NASA Phoenix Mission to Mars: An Out-Of-This-World Content Management Challenge
When NASA's Phoenix Mars lander touches down and begins a historic mission on May 25, the images and video promise to be spectacular. Behind the scenes, an IT team must manage all that content: Here's an inside look at their mission, strategies and tools, from content management to hardware hosting.
When you see the images coming back from the mission next week, you can thank Bitter and Holm and their teams. From an amazing array of images, Bitter and an editorial board hand-select which ones are most useful for public, museum and scientific audiences. Bitter compares it to picking the world's most exotic flowers from a hothouse each day.
Consider the scope of this content management project. First, video and images must travel from Mars on a unique journey via NASA deep space antennae, before making their way onto NASA computers and the Web. As Holm matter-of-factly puts it, "Our data is millions of miles away."
Yet, beginning with the Mars mission in 2004, images coming from deep space could appear on the Web within about 15 minutes or so of NASA receiving them. "It was a huge mindshift," Holm says. "Before, scientists would analyze the images for hours, days, weeks, before publishing them with the analysis. Now that analysis happens with the worldwide community in real time."
In fact, circa 2002, NASA's content management infrastructure was far from sophisticated, Holm says. A single server in the basement was supporting the NASA website where the public got news of missions, she says. If you visited the site back then, you might see a message like "Tune in at 3 for a press conference", she adds. "That was state of the art for large events at NASA," Holm says. "Delivering information via the Web was a "time-consuming, onerous process."
The 2004 Mars mission benefitted from NASA's launch of a new portal in 2003 and working with content management vendor Vignette to better manage and publish its content to its internal and public audiences, Holm says.
"For this [2008] mission, we are continuing what we did in 2004, where we provide 'real time' images as they are received on Earth from the spacecraft," Holm says. "We see them at the same time as the public sees them."
The NASA site will serve real-time video of the Earth-based events, conferences, science discussions, and so forth. The actual video from Mars must travel for a while via deep space antennae then be processed on Earth before it is posted. So it's not "real time" video from Mars, but it's still showing up rather quickly.
How many people will tune in on the Web? "Well over 250,000 users watched the mission control proceedings on NASA TV, with more than 50,000 connecting simultaneously," Holm says. "In 2004 there were more than 60 million unique visitors and over 550 million page views and 17.5 billion hits. Based on trends since then for our other missions and launches, we expect to see a significant increase to this, perhaps twice as much."
