Borland Software Used in NASA Rovers' Search for Evidence that Water and Life Once Existed on Mars

Borland Solutions Help Develop NASA's Collaborative Information Portal

SCOTTS VALLEY, Calif. - Feb 18, 2004 : Borland Software Corporation (Nasdaq NM: BORL) today announced that NASA used Borland solutions to quickly develop the Collaborative Information Portal (CIP) for the Mars Exploration Rovers mission. A long-term NASA research effort, this mission uses two robot geologists named Spirit and Opportunity to gather data from the surface of the red planet. By analyzing atmospheric, soil, and mineral samples from the Martian surface, the two rovers provide information on whether water and life were ever present on Mars.

Borland solutions were used to develop the CIP infrastructure, which was built with Enterprise JavaBeans™ and Web Services. The CIP infrastructure provides data and images downloaded from Mars, along with personnel and event schedules, the current time in various earth and Mars time zones, and broadcast messages. CIP client applications are used by NASA scientists and researchers throughout the world, and by mission managers inside mission control at the Jet Propulsion Laboratories (JPL) in Pasadena, Calif.

“We had less than two years to complete the CIP infrastructure, a primary component for getting both data from the Mars rovers and mission status information over to the scientists and into mission control.” said Ronald Mak, senior scientist at the Research Institute for Advanced Computer Science and CIP middleware architect for NASA. “The Collaborative Information Portal also participated in several operational readiness tests at JPL before the rovers landed on Mars. Increasing developer productivity was critical, and I looked for a development environment that supported Enterprise JavaBeans, Web Services, and the BEA® WebLogic® application server. The CIP infrastructure also interacts with backend data stores consisting of file servers and an Oracle Metadatabase, making integration key to the development process. The Borland solution delivered the interoperability that NASA needed, enabling us to deliver integral functionality within a very tight schedule.”

The massive amounts of data gathered by the rovers during their 90-day missions are transmitted via satellites from Mars, processed by ground-based software, and then stored on file servers at JPL. The Collaborative Information Portal enables NASA scientists and researchers to quickly retrieve this data for analysis according to various search criteria, such as file type and which rover instrument generated the data. Borland solutions had an important role in the development of this key software.

Images captured by the NASA Mars Exploration Rovers, as well as details on their mission, can be found at: http://marsrovers.nasa.gov/home/index.html. For more details on Borland solutions, see: http://www.borland.com/us/products/alm/.

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