VISUALIZATION

BEA Systems, Inc. announced that the BEA WebLogic Enterprise Platform is delivering vital information to NASA scientists around the world about whether water, and perhaps life, once existed on Mars. Hundreds of scientists at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) in Pasadena, Calif., and at other NASA facilities and universities in the U.S. and abroad, are actively studying data beamed by the two Mars Exploration Rovers, Spirit and Opportunity, from the red planet's surface. This data travels over NASA's Deep Space Network, an international network of antennae located in Australia, Spain, and the U.S. The data is processed by ground-based software and then stored on file servers at JPL. The processed data is made available to the scientists and researchers over the Internet by a middleware layer powered by BEA WebLogic Server(TM). This middleware layer was built using Enterprise JavaBeans (EJB), the Java Message Service (JMS), and Web services. The middleware layer serves several key client applications, including the Collaborative Information Portal and Viz. The Collaborative Information Portal is a Java application that allows users to view data generated by the various rover instruments. Viz is a C++ application that allows users to view and rotate three-dimensional images taken by the rovers' stereo cameras. Besides data, the middleware layer also provides event and personnel schedules and the current time in various Earth and Mars time zones, while the message service enables mission managers to broadcast messages. The Collaborative Information Portal and BEA WebLogic Server have important roles in mission operations in that the portal displays these schedules, times and messages. ''This achievement is the culmination of years of work, and is possibly the first step toward manned explorations on Mars,'' said Tod Nielsen, executive vice president and chief marketing officer, BEA Systems. ''Data is the lifeblood of this mission, and around-the-clock data access is crucial to NASA's scientists so that they can formulate meaningful conclusions about Mars. BEA WebLogic software is helping scientists collaborate in order to locate, view, analyze and integrate the data collected by the rovers.'' NASA chose BEA WebLogic Server for its reliability and scalability in handling the massive number of page views and volume of data throughout the 90-day mission. In fact, BEA WebLogic Server stood up to an immense load when Spirit touched down on Jan. 3, 2004, and began transmitting data. The portal continues to regularly deliver images taken by each rover's nine cameras and processed data from soil and atmospheric samples taken with robotic arms, giving scientists greater insight into the planet's history.