NASA's control room flooded with Macs during Mars Curiosity landing
Sometimes pictures are worth a thousand words, like those that appeared over NASA's live feed showing a control room riddled with Macs and other Apple products during the historical landing of the Curiosity rover on planet Mars last night.
The photos, captured from the live stream by Reddit users (via TMO), show nearly a dozen Macs -- in addition to iPhones and even iPads -- in use by the space agency's Entry, Descent and Landing Operations (EDL Ops) team at its Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California Sunday evening.
NASA engineers can be seen fixated on their MacBook Pro screens and incoming data as the $2.6 billion Curiosity made a dramatic arrival on the Martian planet during what NASA scientists have dubbed "seven minutes of terror."
One closeup photo confirms that these Macs were indeed running Mac OS X and not a flavor of Windows, while a second shows a lone IBM ThinkPad looking a bit out of place among the Apple-dominated lab.
The two thousand pound car-sized rover set off from earth on November 26th, equipped with 17 cameras and a laser that will help NASA engineers survey the planet and its terrain from the Jet Propulsion Lab in an effort to determine whether Mars ever had an environment that was able to support life forms.
For some of the latest photos coming from Curiosity, check out this page over at NASA.
The photos, captured from the live stream by Reddit users (via TMO), show nearly a dozen Macs -- in addition to iPhones and even iPads -- in use by the space agency's Entry, Descent and Landing Operations (EDL Ops) team at its Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California Sunday evening.
NASA engineers can be seen fixated on their MacBook Pro screens and incoming data as the $2.6 billion Curiosity made a dramatic arrival on the Martian planet during what NASA scientists have dubbed "seven minutes of terror."
One closeup photo confirms that these Macs were indeed running Mac OS X and not a flavor of Windows, while a second shows a lone IBM ThinkPad looking a bit out of place among the Apple-dominated lab.
The two thousand pound car-sized rover set off from earth on November 26th, equipped with 17 cameras and a laser that will help NASA engineers survey the planet and its terrain from the Jet Propulsion Lab in an effort to determine whether Mars ever had an environment that was able to support life forms.
For some of the latest photos coming from Curiosity, check out this page over at NASA.
Comments
Nice - although they also use Chrome, Firefox as well as Parallels... also worth a thousand words, no?
I actually tweeted about this while watching the landing! It was pretty impressive (both the landing and all the Macs!).
Yay the Mac! Not that Apple will give a stuff, they don't care about people using their products for serious work, they only want to sell you more rock songs.
Normal. They all look like Geniuses ...
Just wait until NASA's iCloud account get hacked and they use Find My Rover to wipe Curiosity's drive.
Maybe the JPL team just use Windows PCs to gain experience of "crashes" ;~)
Quote:
Originally Posted by Zoolook
Nice - although they also use Chrome, Firefox as well as Parallels... also worth a thousand words, no?
If you look closely there's a status indicator if it's open or not. And all those apps you said are not open. Also, this picture was caught DURING their work.
Most of mission control actually runs Linux. Fact.
Or send it to Saturn, or better yet Uranus lol.
Quote:
Originally Posted by thataveragejoe
Most of mission control actually runs Linux. Fact.
Perhaps for the back-end servers I can see that, however I think they are predominantly a Windows (or now OSX) on the desktop. Ubuntu is nice though. Any links to check this out further?
To be picky, that picture is not really the control room. For pictures/video of the control room:
http://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/msl/news/panorama20120804.html
http://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2012/08/watch-the-nasa-control-room-react-to-curiositys-martian-touchdown/260734/
deleted
Quote:
Originally Posted by umrk_lab
Normal. They all look like Geniuses ...
No doubt. They are definitely geniuses... They all look extremely nerdy- like the "I'm a PC" guy.
Speaking of, this is worth watching:
Recall when NASA was working to get rid of all Mac and go pure WINTEL, not too long ago.
Great picture for the next time some idiot thinks an iPad with Mickey Mouse iOS is a computer. This is what you can do with an Apple computer and a real OS.
Those are ?personal? computers not NASA ones certainly, a government agency buying Macs, NO WAY!