Slash Lane
The photos, captured from the live stream by Reddit users (via TMO), show nearly a dozen Macs — in addition to iPhones and even iPads — in use by the space agency's Entry, Descent and Landing Operations (EDL Ops) team at its Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California Sunday evening.
NASA engineers can be seen fixated on their MacBook Pro screens and incoming data as the $2.6 billion Curiosity made a dramatic arrival on the Martian planet during what NASA scientists have dubbed "seven minutes of terror."
One closeup photo confirms that these Macs were indeed running Mac OS X and not a flavor of Windows, while a second shows a lone IBM ThinkPad looking a bit out of place among the Apple-dominated lab.
The two thousand pound car-sized rover set off from earth on November 26th, equipped with 17 cameras and a laser that will help NASA engineers survey the planet and its terrain from the Jet Propulsion Lab in an effort to determine whether Mars ever had an environment that was able to support life forms.
For some of the latest photos coming from Curiosity, check out this page over at NASA.
Wesley Hilliard
Marko Zivkovic
William Gallagher
Malcolm Owen
Mike Wuerthele and Malcolm Owen
Andrew O'Hara
Amber Neely
Andrew Orr
138 Comments
Nice - although they also use Chrome, Firefox as well as Parallels... also worth a thousand words, no?
I actually tweeted about this while watching the landing! It was pretty impressive (both the landing and all the Macs!).
Yay the Mac! Not that Apple will give a stuff, they don't care about people using their products for serious work, they only want to sell you more rock songs.
Normal. They all look like Geniuses ...
[quote name="justmark" url="/t/151756/nasas-control-room-flooded-with-macs-during-mars-curiosity-landing#post_2162685"]I actually tweeted about this while watching the landing! It was pretty impressive (both the landing and all the Macs!). [/quote] Just wait until NASA's iCloud account get hacked and they use Find My Rover to wipe Curiosity's drive.