Reliable Service-Oriented Architecture for Nasa's Mars Exploration Rover Mission

The Collaborative Information Portal (CIP) for NASA's Mars Exploration Rover (MER) mission was created by NASA's Ames Research Center and Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL). Both MER and CIP have outperformed their forecasts. CIPs are carried out by mission managers, engineers, scientists, and mission researchers at JPL mission control, as well as by scientists in their laboratories, residences, and offices. Users are linked to the internet in a secure manner. The CIP displayed the current time in different time zones of the planet Mars and Earth, as well as personnel and event schedules using Martian time scales, because the expedition took place at Mars' time. In this paper, we present the MER and a CIP mission summary. We show how the CIP was put to work to meet some of the mission's requirements. We discuss the criteria for choosing its architecture, web services (current time ratio between planet Earth and the planet Mars, conversion of Martian (Sol) and Earth Day, and direct connection to planet Mars) and how developers made the software so reliable.