Mars Polar Lander Mission Distributed Operations

The Mars Polar Lander (MPL) mission was the first planetary mission to use Internet-based distributed ground operations where scientists and engineers collaborate in daily mission operations from multiple geographically distributed locations via the Internet. This paper describes the operations system, the Web Interface for Telescience (WITS), which was used by the MPL mission for Internet-based operations. The MPL mission was a lander which landed near the south pole of Mars on December 3, 1999, although communication with the lander was never achieved. WITS was used for generating command sequences for the lander’s robotic arm and robotic arm camera, and as a secondary tool for sequence generation for the stereo camera on the lander. WITS was also used as a public outreach tool.