NASA Releases Mars Data for Maestro

The Maestro Team writes "The Jet Propulsion Laboratory has released the first Mars data update for Maestro, containing images just received from the Spirit Mars rover. Maestro is the public version of the actual tool used by the mission scientists to operate the rover. You can download Maestro and the latest Mars images from the official Maestro site, and join the developers and other users in #maestro on irc.freenode.net."

Looks Pretty Interesting....

[Spikeman56]

Downloaded it and its pretty cool lookin... it's neat to see the pre-processed raw images. They even have a 3d model of the rover and its surroundings (however the rendering process makes everything EXTREMELY dissying). What puzzled me though is that Maestro is written in Java and a java application can be run on any virtual machine that has the necessary files therefore preventing seperate OS editions, but for some reason this has separate douwnloads for Linux/Solaris, Windows, and OSX. Hmm... anyway looking forward to the next data pack!

These are the kinds of things that will...

[Fortunato_NC]

These are the kinds of things that will interest people in space exploration again. Although the site is "conserving bandwidth", and didn't have as much info as I would like available right this second, the idea that I can be reviewing the data returned by the Mars rovers at the same time as NASA's scientists is really, really appealing.

This is the kind of thing that makes people seriously consider careers in science. Imagine a father and son (or mother and daughter) pouring over this info together, comparing their take with NASA's. That's super exciting.

Maybe one of the kids downloading Maestro today will take the first steps on Mars tomorrow...

Re:Looks Pretty Interesting....

[glassesmonkey]

They have a 3D interactive map. This will be really cool when they fill in with more data from Mars.

Why is it that I just got one of the coolest software programs (java) that is free, educational and it didn't crash my computer. I hate you Microsoft.

Maestro is sooooo cool

[LiquidCoooled]

I love this program. I have never felt so close to space exploration as I do when I'm poking around it.

It is an awe inspiring mission and this software practically lets you touch it.

Heres an interesting quote from their "Conductor" guided tour of the dataset, which is extensive and shows you EVERYTHING they have on the mission so far.
(emphasis mine)


The images shown here were among the first to arrive from Mars. The Navcam image on top was taken before the rover mast was deployed. The rover's high-gain antenna can be seen on the left side of the image. It was this image, loaded in the mission version of Maestro, that gave the scientists their first glimpse of where Spirit had landed.

2 billion hits

[bstadil]

You are quite right and even better the NASA folks are keenly aware of this. I saw an interview with one of the JPL directors on Nasa TV and he said they had gotten more than 2 billion hits to the NASA web site since the landing. In perspective this is more than they got during all of 2003.

Second I think it is real cool that some of the key people in the project / science team at NASA are women. Maybe this will help in that department as well, we sure need their brain power in the tech sector.

Re:Welcome Slashdotters!

[Jagasian]

I think we need to divert money from the military to NASA :) It should be a 50/50 split.

Disappointed by all the spam....

[JPL-Jeff]

Well, I really hope that people won't be scared away from Maestro because of all the rubbish posted here. It certainly killed any useful discussion before it could start. It's a pity - we worked very hard on Maestro, and I think that there are a lot of people out there who would enjoy it.

I'm very new to Slashdot (ok, ok, I joined just so I could announce Maestro :) ). Does this happen often? How is it usually dealt with? It seems like in situations like this the editors might consider just pulling the article and posting it again later.

Of course, I don't see how anyone could even FIND this post considering the company it will be keeping.. oh well! :(

Jeff Norris
Maestro Team Lead
Jet Propulsion Laboratory

Re:Why are we doing this?

[Anonymous Coward]

Once the rich and careless are done using up this planet like so much toilet paper, they are going to need somewhere else to go. Expect a dozen or so decades of manned explorations, then some kind of terraforming breakthrough. The rich and careless don't worry about the environment on Earth because they know they aren't going to be here and neither are their lineage. It's all part of the master plan...

The average bandwidth Nasa is working with:

[__aailob1448]

I asked JPL-jeff on IRC about it and his answer was:

gozu - I don't have the numbers in front of me. It's like about 15 Mbits of products per day on the HGA, more like 180 Mbits per day on the UHF if we do all the orbiter passes.

So it averages out to 2.3 Kbps! Of course, this is in bursts so the real speeds are higher than this. But still...It's shocking.

Picture(s) Hint @ Life on Mars???

[rm3friskerFTN]

The USA Today article Imprint shows Mars craft landed in 'weird stuff' [usatoday.com] describes "The soil was stripped up and folded in an interesting way," said Jim Bell, who designed the panoramic camera that Spirit used to photograph the "mud-like" patch [nasa.gov]. "It has quite alien textures."

Might this soil crust on Mars be same/similar to the biological soil crust found at Arches National Park [nps.gov] (Moab, Utah)?

Additional details regarding biological soil crusts maybe are to found here:

intermediate details [soilcrust.org]

advanced details [soilcrust.org]