View this article at: http://www.macnn.com/articles/04/01/12/nasa.mars24.sunclock/ Monday, Jan 12, 2004 2:00am 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."