Communications of the ACM
NASA Mars App Redefines 'Mission Creep'
The Analyst's Notebook app designed by the U.S. National Aeronautics and Space Administration to help researchers review data on planetary missions, has expanded to handle the growing amount of information collected by the Mars rovers.
Credit: U.S. National Aeronautics and Space Administration
The U.S. National Aeronautics and Space Administration's (NASA) Analyst's Notebook app, designed to help researchers review data on planetary missions, has expanded to handle the growing volume of information collected by the Mars rovers.
The app's user interface enables data from multiple rovers to be accessed through a Web service. Altogether, two Notebooks represent 7 million to 8 million data products gathered from various instruments at various points of the mission, says Tom Stein at NASA's Planetary Data Systems Geosciences Node.
The Notebooks make the data searchable on a timed-sequence and geospatial basis, and they aim to correlate the data with many documents describing mission operations and activities. The Notebook's map feature has evolved from a maximum range of 600 meters to the nearly 25 miles covered by the Opportunity rover, which Stein says "has forced us to change the way we create the terrain map and how we present it to the user in an interactive manner."
The app initially presented sequential images and enabled image queries based on the time at which they were taken, but today it integrates sequence information, engineering and science data, and documentation for virtual mission replay.
From InformationWeek
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