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Science

Mars Polar Lander Lands Today 95

Posted by Hemos from the to-the-future-and-beyond dept.
Quite a number of people have written, including the Webmaster of the Mars Polar Lander Site to let us know that it will be touching down at ~12:14 PST. The website will have also have a Downlink from the Lander itself which is incredibly cool. Check out their site - but also check out the technical document about the web site. Very interesting read for those of you who want to know about setting up a powerful web site. The web site is using a huge amount of Open Source software - Apache, Perl, PHP, Linux, MySQL and other software as well.
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Mars Polar Lander Lands Today More

Mars Polar Lander Lands Today

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  • Images will make up a significant proportion of the data and during busy periods it is estimated that one 256 bit x 256 bit image could be received by UCLA every minute.

    65.536 bits/minute -> 94.371.840 bits/day -> 82.575.360 bytes/week

    In 4 Gbytes of RAM there are 4.294.967.296 bytes =~ 52 weeks of images (1 year)

    Each of the origin servers uses dual Pentium II 450 CPUs. They are equipped with 512MB RAM and approximately 20GB of internal storage. An external RAID5 system provides an additional 50GB of storage.

    That storage would be nice to store the Apache logs, but it seems unnecessary, the images aren't bulky (4 Gb/year). However, they would not keep a year of images in memory, for speed.

    Exactly, what are we supposed to learn about this configuration? It doesn't make sense to me.
  • Another mic question:

    As I was waking up this morning, I *think* that my radio told me that the first sounds from the probe would be the voices of MS engineers -- they did a test (here on earth) and then didn't delete.

    Anyone else hear this, or was I dreaming?
  • Nice idea, but not feasible. You'd need to get a direct transmission model, not a bucket-dropper(Direct film return), i.e., post KH-9. These are big machines- Hubble+ sized. There's just no way at all you could move one to Mars orbit with current boosters. Add to that they aren't cheap- the budget for space surveillence is rather high, and each satellite is mucho expensive.

    Eric

  • From the article:
    | ``We put all the sequences together and
    | basically we send the arm's sequence machine an
    | e-mail with an attachment. So it gets the
    | e-mail and it says, ``OK, I'll move over here
    | and I'll dig a trench,'' Slostad said.

    Didn't anyone tell NASA to never just blindly open an e-mail attachment? Next thing you know, the lander will be emailing one of the Voyager probles, instructing it to send the latest make.money.fast scheme to the first intelligent life it encounters.

    This will be, of course, the REAL reason aliens attack, hell bent on destroying the Earth.

    And all because some poor robotic arm on Mars opened an e-mail attachment. The lesson: DON'T DO IT!

    ;)
  • Comment removed based on user account deletion
  • 3:00pm ET. So much for that web server.
  • I guess it couldn't handle it. At 2:09pm CST, it was hosed, can't connect, or get a recursive page that says "Document has moved here" with "here" being a link to itself.
  • You are right. However, they say that images would make up a significant proportion of the data, and lacking more information, that's what I could say.

    Oh, never mind.

  • One alternate site for the coverage - live! (Score:3)

    by yule ( 42265 ) on Friday December 03, 1999 @10:24AM (#1484741) Journal
    If the main site is /.ed, try http://www.marsportal.com. They (we) have images and several live cameras from inside mission control at UCLA.

    (Disclaimer - Yes, I am indirectly related to this site.)

    -shane
  • but I smell some new desktop background images once this probe starts transmitting!
  • And I doubt that the images are 256x256x1 as per your calculations...x8, x16, anybody know?
  • Oh, terrific idea. Down with NASA. Their only field of technological advancement of any importance is space, right? I mean, jeez, they've had thirty whole years to get past the moon and all they can manage to do is launch unsuccessful missions hundreds of thousands of miles further away?

    Are our standards just a *bit* high? Space should be a now thing? Get a grip. Tons of people would be happy to tell you that science fiction is an important part of scientific advance, but it's still science fucking fiction. These people are limited by (gasp!) laws of physics and current-day propulsion techniques.

    Fucking stupidity. Fucking stupidity everywhere. I hate it.
    -- Ozone Pilot
  • Q: If university graduates can't express themselves in their native tongue, what are the chances they can:
    (a) tell the difference between units of measurement; or
    (b) wire a plug without leaving conductors exposed; or
    (c) operate a parachute by remote control?
  • Well, they could be grayscale (8 bit/pixel), but I did not calculate the pixel depth, they said that:

    ... it is estimated that one 256 bit x 256 bit image could be received by UCLA every minute. ...

    Perhaps they meant pixels, who knows.
  • Nothing wrong with my connection. I can post on Slashdot (the definitive statement for being well-connected in this modern world) and can traceroute quite happily to the Mars Lander site. I suspect there's something unusual happening with the funky load balancing/Caching/DNS magic described in the technical document. [netapp.com] I'm sure I won't be the only person experiencing problems reaching the site -- and yes, I did try several times. :-)
    --
    Paul Gillingwater
  • Yep. heard it on NPR. The mic is on a Russian science package and I guess after it was launched someone remembered that they didn't clear the memory chip for the mic so there is probly the voices of the guys doing a sound check.

    For some reason I have an image of Tom Hanks dressed as an Aerosmith roadie doing mic checks on SNL's Wayne's World.
  • What software are you using?
  • the probe didn't crash along with the servers.

    They've been hosed since about 1.30 CST.
  • If I were an shy ET type, this would be the perfect opportunity to make yourself known to the world in a non-threatening sort of way.

    The first image comes down and it's... it's.... OH MY GOD! It's Ray Walston!

    (for those of you that don't know.. this was the guy in My Favorite Martian)

  • broadcast.com was supposed to offer a 300K Windows Media Player stream. They can't even keep their 28.8 streams running at full speed. They stopped working for me at 11AM PST...

    Hmm, no contact at first attempt. 10 minutes past. Hopefully something just went into safemode.
  • I'm watching the discovery channel right now - am I completly wrong and don't understand plain English, or did they lost this spacecraft as well? Nooooo!

    It ruins my day.

    Regards,

    January

  • As of this writing, the first signals from the Martian Lander were supposed to have been received about 35 minutes ago. So far they have been unable to detect any. JPL is saying that there is no reason for extreme pessimism just yet. There are a number of possibilities as to the cause, and some of them are correctable.
  • They're going to try again a little before
    5PM EST (2200UTC). They say they think it
    went into safe mode upon landing, or that
    the antenna wasn't pointed in quite the right
    direction.
  • It's actually more properly "the news is less than perfect". I mean, you're landing this little thing on another planet. The chances of everything working exactly like planned the first time around is pretty small. It'll work. Trust me >:D
  • this coming sometime after.. those reports of one of the last missions crashing b/c of conversion problems between American & metric

  • I was one of the many to submit this... (Score:4)

    by legoboy ( 39651 ) on Friday December 03, 1999 @04:09AM (#1484770)
    You can also watch a NASA tv feed at broadcast.com. The have a 300k stream, which is cool. (MediaPlayer format, though)

    Here's the broadcast.com link: http://www.broadcast.com/events/n asa/marslanding/ [broadcast.com]

    ------

  • it will be on discovery channel, live! (Score:3)

    by Frederic54 ( 3788 ) on Friday December 03, 1999 @04:11AM (#1484771) Journal
    i think it starts at 3:30pm, and first picture will come at 4pm, on Discovery Channel
    --
    http://www.beroute.tzo.com
  • Why is this post moderated to 0?

    It can be very annoying to readers in outside the US that times are noted in PST, EST, CST and I don't know what. Why use all those standards (which are in fact local standards to you guys in America) on a global medium like the internet?

  • PST (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward

    Does anyone know what time this is for other parts of the world? I am sure people would find this useful! Someone must be running a world time clock on their desktop who can quickly post times around the world that correlate to 12.00 PST?

  • the last failed mission was not a problem with conversions. the martians are just tired of our noisy little probes. we had to send this one all the way to the south pole so they would leave us alone.

    the metric system is another conspiracy entirely...


  • The setup is _sweet_...however, I'm wondering how many people caught the os (Solaris x86) that they were using. As beautiful/wonderful/powerful as Linux/(Free||Open||Net)BSD are, and even in the presence of such popular and generally spiffy open source software, solaris is still rock solid. i disliked alot of things about solaris on x86 (in comparison to the sparc version), but stability was never one of them....and i'm surprised not to see more similar setups like this (commercial OS + tons of open source software==very nice).
  • At least in my part of the US, which may explain that peculiar tic some people have around here. :)

    This could be a Big Day, as long as we don't puncture the Red Planet's fragile membrane and cause it to deflate. ;)
  • They're actually using Solaris x86 which I've heard isn't as stable as Solaris SPARC.
    Excellent setup, but I'd like to know if there's a way to make my Apache send a cached php page depending on cookie data.
  • Comment removed based on user account deletion
  • it's 3:30pm and 4pm Eastern Time (Québec), anyway check your TV listings for Discovery Channel, i think it's only in North America and Canada?
    --
    http://www.beroute.tzo.com

  • Some random thoughts (Score:3)

    by jd ( 1658 ) <imipak@ y a hoo.com> on Friday December 03, 1999 @04:27AM (#1484783) Homepage Journal
    If it's on NASA Select, then it'll also be multicast =at full TV quality=. Throw that old RealAudio player out the window, install VIC, RAT and SDR, and enjoy a decent transmission, for a change! (* Assuming your ISP supports multicasting, or you can get a multicast tunnel set up *)

    A live downlink, eh? Just add an uplink, next time, and patch in Luner Lander...

    Whatever the guys at NASA do, =DON'T SNEEZE!= At least, not until the probe lands. Nobody really believes in that metric/imperial problem, with the last probe. We all know it's cos there was a flour fight in the control room, and nobody could tell which switch was which.

    The webmaster of NASA -told- Slashdot about this? I hope, for their sakes, they've laid in some extra lines of that 2 terabit fibre...

  • We keep sending them up, and they keep shooting them down...

    ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
    Artificial intelligence or natural stupidity?
  • Yeah...I noticed the OS being used...

    It seems that if you're going to use Solaris, give it the good hardware (Sparc) that its really designed to run on.

    If you're going to use x86, I'd go (being a Linux user myself) with one of the Open Source BSD's...

    I'm definitely not a fan of Solaris on x86.

    Another thing I noticed is that they're using Apache's reverse proxy and rewriting modules to front end the actual web servers actually hosting the content...I don't have much experience with this, but wouldn't squid accomplish the same thing with less overhead and higher performance (and more clusterability)?

    I know we've been fairly whelmed with Apache's reverse proxy'ing and rewriting...its not bad, but you're dealing with a lot of overhead (particularly memory consumption) by using Apache that could be avoided with squid.

    *shrug* Just a couple of thoughts.

    Jeff
  • Forget the fact that this mission is going to land on the freaking polar icecaps of Mars to look for water (as opposed to CO2/Dry Ice). And who cares about the meteorlogical research. But they use OSS!!!!! Oh my god, please let us know about that!

    Funny, this /. article mentions that they use many OSS technologies, such as Linux. I didn't see Linux mentioned *ANYWHERE* in that document....
  • Well, I'm sort of interested in this... From NetCraft [netcraft.com], it seems that static [netcraft.com] and products [netcraft.com] .mars.ucla.edu are running apache on solaris (as the article says), however www.marspolarlander.com [netcraft.com] shows up as apache on BSD/OS. The article dosen't say what the NetCache servers are running, but it seems that it may be a BSD derivative.

    Notice that the article wasn't a post from the webmaster, but from the NetApp company (which makes sense, it's good press for them and their product).

    I also note that, contrary to the original post, they don't mention Linux anywhere.

    I do question their choice of OS though. I love Solaris, but everyone I know who has run Solaris x86 has been disappointed by it. For sheer processing horsepower, and the ability to move a lot of data across a system bus, you just can't beat a SPARC. (although, there was mention of a linux port to the S/390, that might do it...)

    But anyway, my overall impression of the setup is: Rox!

  • More than 3 billion Web hits per day and 300 million page requests per day against up to 2 terabytes of data" and wasn't even using the W2K Advanced Datacenter Server.

    That is a very large assumption considering we have no idea what the load is or where the bottleneck is. Given the experience of the Pathfinder (which crushed all previous load records two years ago) this could be in fact exceeding the 300 million page load/day rate, and with a much higher image load than shown in the Unisys demo.

    You can have a datacenter with 100 trillion page load per day capacity be useless if your backbone provider can't handle the load. As the Chicago Mercantile Exchange found out.

    By the way, did you ask youself exactly WHY the Advanced Datacenter Server wasn't used by Unisys? Or why they needed over 100 CPUs for this 'proof of concept'? What the hell is the manageability of that many servers, anyway?

  • It doesn't sound at all like they've lost it... from what they're saying (I'm watching it on Link TV here at NASA) they expected something like this to happen. The 12:39 time was just the first window they had, and something has probably triggered it to go into safe mode. It might even be a few days before they get anything... or it might be a few minutes from now...
  • I work on a space program that earlier this year suffered the most expensive unmanned space accident in history, on a relatively routine insertion into a geosynchronous orbit. I no longer harbor high expectations for this kind of thing.
  • We keep sending probes, and the Martians keep shooting them down ...
  • See ... their SDI system works ...
  • If NASA fails hear, I think its time for the to go. Their history of failure in recent years just seems to be rising steadily.

    What happened to the days when NASA took us to the moon. Nothing as great has happened in my life time as a result of NASA.

    Perhaps the bureacracy (sp?) that is NASA has grown to impede its own growth. In its younger years it seems to have accomplished tasks well beyond that which it is capable of today.

    So my question is, WHAT THE HELL HAPPENED?

    America seems motivated, and wanting to go forward. But NASA seems to want to give us a lack luster performance.

    Something needs to be done... Perhaps a NASA2 to inspire competition between the two, with congress appropriately funding the one making the most progress.

    I'm tired of waiting... Space should be a now thing... and was promised to us when we were kids... the now shouldn't be tomorrow...

  • err,

    and stuff.
  • It wasn't moderated to 0. Anonymous Coward posts always start at 0.

  • Re:PST (Score:2)

    by joe52 ( 74496 )
    Someone must be running a world time clock on their desktop who can quickly post times around the world that correlate to 12.00 PST?

    Here's a web site that does time conversions:
    http://www.timeanddate.com/wor ldclock/fixedform.html [timeanddate.com]

    Here is a link to times around the world at noon today, PST [timeanddate.com]

    joe
  • Looks like the Webmaster needs to rethink his configuration. I notice even Slashdot.org's advertising banners sometimes don't appear -- would you believe that the advertisers get Slashdotted too? :-) ERROR The requested URL could not be retrieved

    While trying to retrieve the URL: http://www.marspolarlander.com/ [marspolarlander.com]

    The following error was encountered:

    • Connection Failed

    The system returned: (79) Connection refused

    This means that: The remote site or server may be down. Please try again soon.

    Generated by squid/1.1.9@cache.iaea.org
    --
    Paul Gillingwater

  • They are probably using f5's bigip load balancer, which runs on BSD/OS and makes www.marspolarlander.com show up as a BSD/OS box. The actual boxes serving the content would be something behind that.

    Well, in this case the boxes behind it are netapp boxes ("netcache" is their product name) acting as accelerators. The idea here is that if most of their content is static (and it looks like it is), then the accelerators can serve the vast majority of the hits.

    You don't need a whole lot of disk IO, and lots of architectures can easily run out of network bandwidth or memory before having any problems with bus bandwidth.
  • Comment removed based on user account deletion

  • Is this SOOOO hard?

    I know my GMT offset, even though I don't live in Europe.

    That's because GMT is the standard. I know my GMT offset too. Maybe, therefore, it would be a good idea just to give the time in GMT? It's not trying to remember two numbers that's the pain, it's idiocy like expecting the whole world to memorise the name of each and every time zone, just in case something happens there.

    dylan_-


    --

  • I love this space stuff. Mars in particular. Last time they did one of these, July 4 a few years back, it was killing me. The radio silence thing during the landing just kills me. I keep thinking that the lander is going to break or something. I absolutley love the photos and the data they gather but the landing process sucks, at least from a spectator's perspective.

    This got me to thinking. The photos aren't great, they are good but they aren't awesome. Regardless of our record, I think the landing process is error prone. The landers don't last too long. The focus of their coverage is also extremely limited, Likewise, we can do insane stuff with spy satallites, like seeing through water and dirt like they did with the Nile river. Anyone want to start a petition to get an older spy sat donated to NASA? a 15 year old sat. should be far better than what they are landing, not terribly useful to the NRO anymore and putting it into place should be relatively cheap and assuming that they use metric units it should be a piece of cake. Then we could have high resolution photos from all sorts of places on Mars and with ground penetrating radar and photography we could look deeper than the current lander is going to look. Plus it would last for years and we could examine thousands of Martian locations we wouldn't get to examine the Martian dirt but I would think that our results would be just as good if not better. Plus they'd end up declassifying some more infor on what our spy sats can do...

  • Came across this [yahoo.com] at Yahoo. I can't WAIT for AT&T's explanation on this one.

    .pjd
  • Kudos to their webmaster for taking the trouble to write his configuration down. It's great that someone is prepared to share his experience with the world in this way.
  • Comment removed based on user account deletion
  • Just in case someone wants to debug this, here's a traceroute from where I am.

    1 ibmcisco.iaea.org (195.212.98.65) 13 ms 6 ms 5 ms
    2 vien1br1.vi.at.ibm.net (152.158.32.1) 51 ms 47 ms 80 ms
    3 ehni1br1.eh.de.ibm.net (152.158.2.1) 88 ms 63 ms 103 ms
    4 ehni1br2-10-0-0.eh.de.ibm.net (152.158.0.18) 55 ms 36 ms 36 ms
    5 beth1ar2-8-0-23.md.us.prserv.net (165.87.97.214) 128 ms 138 ms 149 ms
    6 beth1br1-ge-1-0-0-0.md.us.prserv.net (165.87.29.122) 137 ms 139 ms 131 ms
    7 atla1br1-12-0-5.ga.us.prserv.net (165.87.230.1) 149 ms 148 ms 147 ms
    8 atla1sr2-2-0-0.ga.us.prserv.net (165.87.234.4) 147 ms 158 ms 146 ms
    9 165.87.101.253 (165.87.101.253) 152 ms 155 ms 159 ms
    10 corerouter2.Atlanta.cw.net (204.70.9.143) 146 ms 156 ms 149 ms
    11 corerouter1.WillowSprings.cw.net (204.70.9.135) 168 ms 195 ms 170 ms
    12 acr1-loopback.Chicagochd.cw.net (208.172.2.61) 179 ms 183 ms 172 ms
    13 208.172.3.2 (208.172.3.2) 189 ms 176 ms 180 ms
    14 * www.marspolarlander.com (204.71.169.2) 176 ms 171 ms
    --
    Paul Gillingwater

  • Here's the Sun press release [sun.com]. They've got 4 Sun Netra t1's (pretty cute 1U high servers) to help with the website, and some Ultra 80's for other bits.

  • The Mars Polar Lander is only the fourth item we've attempted to land on Mars. I'm excited, but I'm also scared to death. There are too many things that could go wrong. We have no idea what kind of terrain this thing might land on. It could land on a rock, on the edge of a cliff, in a hole, etc.

    I'm worried about how much NASA is hyping this up (and they are hyping it!). Sure, if it goes well, it's great PR. But if something happens to it -- especially after losing the last satellite -- it's gonna be hard for NASA to maintain support. I guess maybe that's what scares me the most.

    Powers&8^]

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