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The costs of the Curiosity rover to Mars
A visitor takes a photo of a sign reading 'Rover Xing' at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California August 2, 2012 ahead of the landing of the Mars rover Curiosity.
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Jeremy Hobson: We have touched down on Mars! The NASA rover Curiosity landed on the surface of the red planet late last night. And it was all hugs at NASA's Jet Propulsion Lab in California. That's because it took a lot of work -- and money -- to make this moment possible.
Marketplace's Eve Troeh reports.
Eve Troeh: The costs of interplanetary exploration are, indeed, astronomical. The previous Mars rovers, named Spirit and Opportunity, cost about $1 billion; the little tank-like vehicle that landed today cost $2.5 billion.
But Pamela Conrad, a key scientist on the mission at Jet Propulsion Laboratory, says no one there is thinking: "Did it cost too much?" They're only thinking:
Pamela Conrad: We're on Mars!
And what about the public reaction?
Conrad: Well given the number of hits to our various NASA websites tonight, I would say that sentiment is well-shared.
Conrad says a high-profile mission like this one spurs interest, and spending, on science education. And encourages public investment in technology that can seem like a long-shot, at first.
Conrad: I think that any great country has to have a diversified portfolio of investments, both in terms of its intellectual pursuits and its financial investments.
No speculation on future funding -- though Mars research is slated for cuts next year. For now, Conrad says, she's glued on images of Mars.
I'm Eve Troeh for Marketplace.
But NASA gives back! My team at NASA Ames Research Center recently made NASA's next-generation mission operations software open source and free (under the Apache 2.0 license). We have demonstrated it showing Curiosity (MSL) data at JPL, but our schedule was later than the schedule for the Curiosity mission, so the Curiosity flight controllers are not using it, at least initially. It is certified for International Space Station operations at JSC in Houston, it will be used by the upcoming IRIS mission at Ames, and will be used by several small satellite missions (small sats, cube sats, nano sats, and clusters of those) being designed now. At least one nonprofit space organization plans to use it, and we are talking to some commercial companies as well.
MCT is state-of-the-art software that came from combining long-proven principles from the software industry with new ideas from NASA's software experts, and tailoring the result with experience and new ideas from some of NASA's best flight controllers. All that was incubated in NASA's Silicon Valley information technology center of excellence--Ames Research Center.
Now we are transferring that technology to the world, thereby following NASA's charter to democratize space. MCT's open sourcing lowers the cost of entry to space activity for commercial and non-commercial organizations, right down to the student level. We intentionally built MCT to be a general-purpose platform, so it can be used not only by NASA, not only for space operations, but for industrial operations or nearly anything else. The demo version can be downloaded and run with no computer skill, and does almost everything the full version does except that it does not save your changes. The demo version even accepts the plugins from the Plugins page, which you should try out. First watch the three-minute video overview. https://sites.google.com/site/openmct/ Also check out our blog: http://openmct.blogspot.com/
