NASA Achieves Data Goals For Mars Rover With Open Source Software 35
caseyb89 writes "Open source projects Nginx, Railo CMS, and GlusterFS are powering Mars Curiosity's big data crunching. 'Taken together, the combination of cloud and open source enabled the Curiosity mission to provide beautiful images in real time, not months delayed; at high quality, not "good enough" quality. A traditional, proprietary approach would not have been this successful, given the short time to deployment and shifting requirements that necessitated the ultimate in agility and flexibility.'"
Re:This is all about the PR end of the system (Score:5, Interesting)
This has nothing to do with processing the data from the rover (which comes in at rates a dial-up modem could handle). It's about the web hosting system that lets casual visitors look at the pretty pictures.
NASA could just upload the stills to Flickr and the videos to Youtube and save some money.
That is not quite true. The images that are seen are actually a mosaic of many images. The individual images are served up as a composite on demand from the servers. It is unlikely that NASA would have the time and resources to convert all of them so they could be displayed on Flickr and Youtube.