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01/12/2004, 2:00am, EST

Monday, January 12th

NASA offers Mars24 "sunclock" app for Mac OS X

NASA's Mars24 displays a Mars "sunclock", a graphical representation of Mars showing the current sun- and nightsides of Mars, along with a numerical readout of the time in 24-hour format. Another reader notes that NASA also offers a Java image browser and mission simulator called Maestro that "purports to be derived from the application used in mission control. It's the only app I know that depends on the new Java3D frameworks, and may be the reason why they were released by Apple." [updated with Maestro info]

Meanwhile readers note that the Mars Rover uses a variation of PowerPC chips: "The computer in each Mars Exploration Rover runs with a 32-bit Rad 6000 microprocessor, a radiation-hardened version of the PowerPC chip used in some models of Macintosh computers, operating at a speed of 20 million instructions per second."


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20 million/sec
0
01/12, 3:49am, EST
That's 20MHz :)
Fresh-Faced Recruit
Joined Jul 2001
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martian CPU hog ?
0
01/12, 5:16am, EST
I tried Mars24 a few days ago and found (according to top) that it was using 60% of CPU.

Michael
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01/12, 8:15am, EST
20 MIPS != 20 MHz
Fresh-Faced Recruit
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CPU Hog!
0
01/12, 8:16am, EST
You're not kidding! On my dual 2 GHz G5, Mars24 uses 30% of the CPUs! Not a program to leave on in the background!
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True...but
0
01/12, 9:54am, EST
20MIPS != 20MHz. That's true. Nevertheless, the processor does run at 20MHz. Writing it out as 20 millions instructions per second is just NASA's way of talking to the layman.
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Mars24 is a Java app
0
01/12, 12:26pm, EST
just goes to show you. *shrug*
Fresh-Faced Recruit
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I like it...
0
01/12, 2:03pm, EST
It would be cool if you could make it your desktop....but its still cool. ^.^
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01/14, 2:37pm, EST
yeah...20 MHZ, but thats what they are looking for probably, they don't want to waste clock cycles, and thus save battery life with this slow speed.
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