CLOUD
NASA Enhances Mars Center's Capability
Towering, High-Resolution Display Allows NASA Achievements to Come Alive in Immersive Presentations -- Enabled by powerful graphics supercomputing technology from Silicon Graphics, NASA Ames Research Center is providing visitors with a unique opportunity to view NASA's latest achievements, including images from the surface of Mars, as they have never been seen. Working in concert with SGI Professional Services, NASA Ames has installed its Mars Center theater -- the West Coast's largest SGI Reality Center facility, capable of immersing audiences in interactive 3D visualizations, multimedia presentations, and panoramic images that can be navigated in real-time.
NASA's new Reality Center features a curved display measuring 14 feet tall and 36 feet wide. The screen is powered by an SGI(R) Onyx(R) 350 with 3 fully loaded InfiniteReality4(TM) graphics pipes and 12 R16000(TM) MIPS(R) processors. Each graphics pipe comes with 1GB of dedicated texture memory enabling massive amounts of imagery to be visualized in an immersive environment. The Onyx(R) system provides a seamless image across the three projectors that are used to create the sense of being on the surface of Mars. The seamless image enables current NASA Mars Center staff to interact with these enormous 3D models based on the latest images from JPL by quickly panning and zooming with simple mouse movements. Designed to spotlight NASA's contributions to space exploration, Earth sciences, and the Silicon Valley technology community, the new Mars Center has quickly become a popular Bay Area attraction since the recent landings of the Spirit and Opportunity Mars Exploration Rovers. Over the past several weeks, more than 50,000 students, teachers, and area residents have witnessed NASA's history-making achievements up close, with SGI(R) visualization technology helping to give them a view of Mars that no still image, television news report or small-format panorama can possibly match. In the future, the Mars Center may also offer additional presentations designed to provide a behind the scenes perspective on the amazing projects on which NASA is working. These inspirational presentations will educate the public about the value of NASA's contributions to our society. Examples include projects such as Future Flight Central, which is developing new ways to improve safety and efficiency at commercial airports, and the computational fluid dynamics studies underway at NASA Ames' supercomputing facility. "The NASA Ames Mars Center is a resounding success, allowing anyone to virtually stand on the Red Planet and take in its alien landscape," said Scott Hubbard, director of NASA Ames Research Center. "As we work on future NASA exploration and research missions -- including human space flight -- we look forward to continued collaborations with SGI." The Mars Center opens its current Mars presentation with a multimedia program produced by NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) tracing man's earliest observations of the Red Planet through NASA's series of Mars exploration missions. Afterward, Mars Center guests view the latest high-resolution Mars images and panoramas downloaded from JPL. Every day, mission control engineers at JPL's Pasadena, Calif., mission control facility receive 168 separate photographs snapped by each Mars Rover. NASA engineers then stitch together the images to create 360-degree panoramas so large that they contain over 50 times more detail than previous NASA panoramic images. While JPL relies on the stereographic images to determine driving routes for the Rovers, NASA Ames can use them to give the public a rare close-up look at the surface of a planet 106 million miles from Earth. Mars Center visitors use stereographic images to view the Martian panoramas in even greater depth and detail. NASA Mars Mission Relies on SGI NASA depended on SGI technology throughout the planning and execution of the Mars Exploration Rover (MER) mission. At JPL, NASA scientists and engineers used four SGI(R) Origin(R) 2000 series servers to study and select MER landing sites. NASA used the systems -- driven by a total of 302 processors -- for descent analysis, trajectory studies, and other compute-intensive tasks. MER mission planners had to balance the concerns of scientists seeking geological "sites of interest" -- where Rovers were most likely to find evidence of water -- with the need for safe landings. This is particularly vital on a planet with mountains reaching up to 16 miles high and a string of canyons nearly 2,500 miles long and five miles deep. "SGI has worked closely with NASA to fuel the kind of innovation and discovery that has defined both organizations throughout their 20-year collaboration," said Bob Bishop, chairman and CEO, SGI. "SGI is committed to serving customers whose mission-critical applications demand real-time big data machines. We are delighted to be a part of yet another thrilling NASA mission, and we eagerly anticipate the discoveries that await us in the years to come." SGI visualization technology also is helping NASA engineers safely pilot the Spirit and Opportunity Rovers while compensating for round-trip space communication lag times of up to 20 minutes. JPL is using SGI(R) Onyx(R) 300 InfiniteReality4 graphics systems and the OpenGL Performer(TM) real-time graphics API to combine daily 360-degree photographic images with terrain data to create a virtual Mars environment. This environment integrates the 3D visualization of the surrounding Martian geography with an interactive model of each Rover. As a result, NASA engineers can safely pilot the vehicles across rocky Martian terrain.
