NASA's Mars Exploration Rovers and the Collaborative Information Portal
Joan Walton, Leslie Keely, and Ronald Mak - NASA Ames Research Center

Date: Wednesday, November 19th, 2003
Time: 6:30pm Refreshments; 7:00pm Speaker
Location: Oak Room, Hewlett Packard, Cupertino (directions)

Free and open to all who wish to attend, but membership is only $10/year.

About the talk:
In June 2003, NASA launched two rovers to the planet Mars as part of the Mars Exploration Rovers (MER) mission. After landing in January 2004 on opposite sides of the planet, these twin robotic geologists will roam the surface and deploy their suites of sophisticated scientific instruments to analyze the Martian environment for evidence of liquid water and life in the past. Mission control will be at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena. NASA developed the Collaborative Information Portal (CIP) to enable scientists and researchers worldwide and mission managers to display and collaborate on data and images downloaded from the rovers. They will also be able to view mission schedules, plans, and reports, show clocks in various time zones (including current Mars times at the landing sites), and send and receive broadcast announcements and notifications. CIP is a three-tier enterprise Java system. The desktop client application is implemented using Swing. The middleware is based on web services and Enterprise JavaBeans. The back end consists of Oracle databases and Java file monitors and data loaders. This talk will present overviews of the MER mission, the CIP client application, and the architecture of the CIP middleware. This is an updated version of the talk presented at the JavaOne conference last June.

About the speakers:
Joan Walton is a computer scientist at the NASA Ames Research Center and the deputy project manager for CIP.

Leslie Keely is a computer scientist at the NASA Ames Research Center and the architect and lead of the CIP client application.

Ronald Mak is a senior scientist at the Research Institute for Advanced Computer Science at the NASA Ames Research Center and the architect and lead of the CIP middleware. (Ron is also a past chapter chairman.)

View their slides (1.6 MB PPT file), watch an amazing video, and find further information at these two websites: http://mars.jpl.nasa.gov/ and http://athena.cornell.edu/the_mission/. See the latest Mars Rover images: http://www.jpl.nasa.gov/mer2004/rover-images/images.html.