Web Paradigms for Searching and Understanding Mission Data
Michael N. Wallick, Mark Powell, Khawaja Shams · Infotech@Aerospace 2011 · 2011
The twin Mars Exploration Rovers, Spirit and Opportunity, have both been in operation on Mars for over 6 years. Hundreds of thousands of images and other pieces of scientific data has been generated by or for each rover during that time. The Mars Science Laboratory (Curiosity) is expected to produce even more data then its predecessors; future missions will dwarf Curiosity and so on. It is necessary to build tools that will scale with the increased data associated with a mission and allow the human operator to make informed decisions based on all available data. Companies such as Amazon and Google thrive on making large amounts of data accessible to their customers. This paper discusses how we have borrowed the paradigms of such web search and e-commerce sites and applied them to interactions with mission data.