Computing Use Innovation With the Twin Rovers

By late 2010, the Mars rovers Spirit and Opportunity has become the first NASA space mission to use cloud computing for daily mission operations. Cloud computing is a way to gain fast flexibility in computing ability by ordering capacity on demand and paying only for what is used. The extensions of the mission allowed for that with time to test new softwares. NASA team is just allowed to rent more computing capacity from externalized computers cloud for a time needed, thus saving costs, hardware maintenance and operating system obsolescence. Cloud further enables us to deliver the data to the international, associated science teams users from nearby locations for faster reaction time as the volume of data used by the Twin Rovers has outgrown the systems originally planned for handling and sharing data, which makes the virtually limitless capacity of cloud computing attractive. JPL entered collaboration with the cloud team of Amazon.com Inc., Seattle. The JPL already had collaborated with the cloud team at Microsoft Corp., Redmond, Wash., to launch the "Be a Martian" website in November 2009, a site enabling the public to participate as citizen scientists, or too with the cloud team at Google Inc., Mountain View, Calif. by which science students at the University of California, San Diego, developed a Martian educational application. JPL cloud-oriented architecture is seen like to use clouds as an extension of their own resources and to run computing and storage where it is most appropriate for each use

The Twin Rovers had also served like a innovation testbed in terms of software giving them more autonomy in flexibility with their journeys on the Martian surface. By March 2010, like a example, rover Opportunity was rendered able to use a newly developed and uploaded software to autonomously choose a target from a wider-angle image, and point its panoramic camera (Pancam) to observe the chosen target through its miscellaneous filters. The new software is called AEGIS, for 'Autonomous Exploration for Gathering Increased Science.' AEGIS chooses science targets based on pre-specified criteria set by the mission science team. It enables high-quality data to be collected more often and in a significantly reduced time frame, within 45 minutes. Next Mars Science Laboratory flight software is to incorporate AEGIS, and it is also being considered for future NASA missions. The AEGIS capability was developed as part of a larger autonomous science framework called OASIS (short for Onboard Autonomous Science Investigation System), which is designed to allow a rover to identify and react to science opportunities. The AEGIS system takes advantage of the OASIS ability to detect and characterize interesting terrain features in rover images