Borland Software Corporation today announced that NASA used
Borland solutions to quickly develop the Collaborative Information
Portal (CIP) for the Mars Exploration Rovers mission. A long-term NASA
research effort, this mission uses two robot geologists named Spirit
and Opportunity to gather data from the surface of the red planet. By
analyzing atmospheric, soil, and mineral samples from the Martian
surface, the two rovers provide information on whether water and life
were ever present on Mars.
Borland solutions were used to develop the CIP infrastructure,
which was built with Enterprise JavaBeans(TM) and Web Services. The
CIP infrastructure provides data and images downloaded from Mars,
along with personnel and event schedules, the current time in various
earth and Mars time zones, and broadcast messages. CIP client
applications are used by NASA scientists and researchers throughout
the world, and by mission managers inside mission control at the Jet
Propulsion Laboratories (JPL) in Pasadena, Calif.
“We had less than two years to complete the CIP infrastructure, a
primary component for getting both data from the Mars rovers and
mission status information over to the scientists and into mission
control,” said Ronald Mak, senior scientist at the Research Institute
for Advanced Computer Science and CIP middleware architect for NASA.
“The Collaborative Information Portal also participated in several
operational readiness tests at JPL before the rovers landed on Mars.
Increasing developer productivity was critical, and I looked for a
development environment that supported Enterprise JavaBeans, Web
Services, and the BEA® WebLogic® application server. The CIP
infrastructure also interacts with backend data stores consisting of
file servers and an Oracle Metadatabase, making integration key to the
development process. The Borland solution delivered the
interoperability that NASA needed, enabling us to deliver integral
functionality within a very tight schedule.”
The massive amounts of data gathered by the rovers during their
90-day missions are transmitted via satellites from Mars, processed by
ground-based software, and then stored on file servers at JPL. The
Collaborative Information Portal enables NASA scientists and
researchers to quickly retrieve this data for analysis according to
various search criteria, such as file type and which rover instrument
generated the data. Borland solutions had an important role in the
development of this key software.
Images captured by the NASA Mars Exploration Rovers, as well as
details on their mission, can be found at:
http://marsrovers.nasa.gov/home/index.html. For more details on
Borland solutions, see: http://www.borland.com/alm/.
About Borland
Borland Software Corporation is a world leader
in platform independent software development and deployment solutions
that are designed to accelerate the entire application development
lifecycle. By connecting managers, testers, designers, developers, and
implementers in real time, Borland enables enterprises worldwide to
define and sustain their competitive advantage. For more information,
visit: http://www.borland.com or the Borland Developer Network at
http://bdn.borland.com.
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