NASA Mars Global Surveyor

Project Details:

Working at the NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory on a Summer Undergraduate Research Fellowship (SURF) from Caltech, this project involved creating a database for storing data from the Mars Global Surveyor mission, including data collected using such tools as the Mars Orbital Laser Altimeter (MOLA) and the Mars Orbital Camera (MOC). The key focus of this project was to design a database schema to take advantage of geospatial indexing which allows for a manner of indexing much more practical than simple time stamps.

In addition, I experimented with distributed computing for database servers. I choose to use MySQL because of its open-source nature and widespread use. I created an interface for web queries using HTML, Java, and SQL and an interface for ArcGIS which could obtain data for a region selected by the uesr. The project resulted in an application that allowed users to obtain data for geographic regions of Mars in a much more reasonable time frame than existing applications, achieving more than a tenfold increase in query speed. I accomplished the project objectives and more and did so with minimal supervision.

Some of the tasks involved:

• Code development (C++, Java, Visual Basic)
• Interfacing with databases (MySQL)
• Implentation of geospatial indexing
• Working with GIS
• Setting up Linux servers
• Distributing load across multiple servers

additional information:

• Categories : Programming
• Location : NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, CA
• Position : Undergraduate Research Fellow
• Supervisor : Dr. Anton B. Ivanov
• Date : 06.2005 – 09.2005
• URL : mars.jpl.nasa.gov/mgs