Even though based on Star Trek, warp drive to enable interplanetary exploration won’t be invented until 2063, mankind is slowly continuing to explore at least its nearby planetary system, thanks to the smart engineers at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL).
The historic landing of Mars rover Curiosity attracted a significant audience, which JPL streamed to hundred thousands of concurrent viewers with Adobe Media Server and Amazon Web Services (AWS).
NASA/JPL’s live video streaming architecture was developed on a combination of Adobe Flash Media Server, Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) instances running the popular nginx caching tier, Elastic Load Balancing, Amazon Route 53 for DNS management, and Amazon CloudFront for content delivery. [via Amazon Case Study]
Below is the impressive architecture from Amazon’s Case Study (which also unveils that Rover Curiosity is actually not running an Adobe Media Server origin, but Amazon ingests Nasa TV’s feed on earth).
It’s a great showcase how technology in space and on earth can work together to let humanity participate in a historic moment.
Learn more about Adobe Media Server, Adobe Media Server 5 on Amazon Web Services, and the Amazon Case Study. Watch the live stream on NASA TV.
And if you are actually interested in Mars, don’t miss this 360 panorama of Mars.
This is the latest panorama released by NASA July 2012. It was assembled from 817 images taken between Dec. 21, 2011, and May 8, 2012, while Opportunity was stationed on an outcrop informally named ‘Greeley Haven’. on a segment of the rim of ancient Endeavour Crater. [via Paroramas.sk]
Simply amazing.
(Featured image and panorama credit NASA/JPL-Caltech)
