Summary

  • Launched in November 2009, Be a Martian paired scientific tasks with avatars, points and questions for experts.
  • Its cloud-based operation addressed a familiar outreach problem: attracting a crowd creates demand for computing capacity, even if the crowd later leaves.

The citizenship offer came with a choice of robotic animal. In November 2009, NASA and Microsoft launched Be a Martian, a website where a visitor could adopt an avatar, help examine Mars images and accumulate game points. Interplanetary belonging had acquired the pleasing convenience of a browser window.

There was work attached. Visitors could help improve maps and count craters. A virtual town hall let them propose questions and vote for ones they wanted experts to discuss. The invitation gave people several ways to join: contribute an observation, express curiosity or return for an answer. NASA was asking an audience to become participants.

Success would create an awkward problem on Earth. As Microsoft’s Marc Mercuri explained in the project partner’s launch account, an attractive public project needed enough servers for peak demand. Buying for the launch crowd left the question of what to do with the machines when attention subsided. A successful invitation could leave a room full of expensive souvenirs.

The site used Windows Azure for computing, a Silverlight application for interaction and the information service then called Dallas. That arrangement put the demand problem into a rented service. The operators could plan around available capacity instead of purchasing a fleet to match their most optimistic publicity day. They still had to decide what the public would do once it got through the door.

Points, avatars and voted questions served that purpose. Counting a crater gave a visitor a bounded job; choosing a question gave curiosity a place to go. These were different demands on the institution. Computing could serve an image to another visitor. An expert answer still required somebody’s attention. The website had more than one kind of queue.

By 2 November 2010, JPL reported more than 54,000 registered “Martian citizens”. The figure counted sign-ups. The same account described how experience with uses including public participation sites had helped JPL gain confidence in cloud computing.

That confidence now reached another operation. The Mars Exploration Rover team had moved its daily activity-planning software and data to cloud resources with Amazon’s help. Be a Martian was the Microsoft collaboration; rover planning had its own users and responsibilities. JPL was learning across several suppliers and applications as it treated computing and storage as capacity it could obtain when needed.

The entertaining invitation and the capacity decision belonged in the same story. A public institution wanted people to turn up, look closely and take part. Hosting those people required a plan for their arrival and their departure. Mars could hand out virtual citizenship. Earth had to work out the running costs.