NASA Releases Mars Data for Maestro 1220
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.... (Score:4, Interesting)
These are the kinds of things that will... (Score:5, Interesting)
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.... (Score:5, Interesting)
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 (Score:3, Interesting)
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 (Score:5, Interesting)
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! (Score:5, Interesting)
Disappointed by all the spam.... (Score:5, Interesting)
I'm very new to Slashdot (ok, ok, I joined just so I could announce Maestro
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? (Score:1, Interesting)
The average bandwidth Nasa is working with: (Score:5, Interesting)
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??? (Score:4, Interesting)
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]