There is a group within NASA that has developed a software tool to plan rover surface activities during the current Mars rover missions. That group is the Maestro Team, and its software tool is called (duh) Maestro, which may be downloaded here. It’s a 38 megabyte download. For the record, here’s a tech paper on what Maestro is supposed to do, and here’s the instruction manual.

The Maestro Team posted an invitation over on Slashdot saying anybody who wanted to could download the Maestro software and periodic data files from its website. This would allow rickyjames, er, John Q. Public, to follow along with the NASA team in planning of the Mars rover science activities. Great idea!!!

The Maestro team members were totally unprepared for what happened next. Their site received so many Internet requests for the initial software download that it promptly crashed, and they are just now managing to get it running smoothly again. So far they have yet to release the first data file for Maestro – they’re still downloading and formatting it from the Spirit rover on Mars, and they’re still trying to figure out how to post it on the Internet for download by everybody out in cyberspace without another pesky server computer crash.

Pressure on NASA server computers has been extremely heavy to support web access by the highly-interested public for data on the ongoing Mars Exploration Rover mission. Still, NASA is managing to keep its head above water and is doing a great job of making this the first Mars mission where the Internet is the primary news distribution medium. No doubt the Maestro team will get its act together and start posting data files for the rock fields surrounding Spirit (and hopefully Opportunity) rovers Real Soon Now.

When it does, you may want to download those data files and follow the rovers the Maestro way. I plan to.

Update [2004-1-5 11:36:55 by rickyjames]:: NASA has released photos taken from an altitude of around 1500 meters (here’s the high-resolution version) showing the crater pattern photographed beneath the descending Spirit lander as it came down. With these photos, previous closeups of this area of Gusev crater, and the huge 27 MB high resolution 75-meter-per-pixel photomap of the entire landing zone, scientists are closing in on exactly where the Spirit lander came down. What an amazing navigation feat, to hit this zone from across the void between planets!!! Let’s roll!!!