Dell helps NASA validate Curiosity Mars landing

BANGALORE, INDIA: NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) is apparently employing Dell HPC clusters to test and validate the landing sequence of Curiosity, the Mars rover.

JPL's Dell HPC clusters, Galaxy and Nebula, assisted NASA in analyzing the relevant mission data for NASA to ensure the most complicated portion of the mission to the Red Planet was successfully completed, stated a release.

It added that Dell supported the landing of NASA's new Mars rover, the most complicated portion of the mission, with data analysis conducted in two NASA High Performance Computing (HPC) clusters running Dell PowerEdge servers.

Managed by JPL in Pasadena, California, the Mars rover, Curiosity, is the largest rover ever sent to explore the Red Planet. Researchers plan to use Curiosity to study the mountain's layers, which hold evidence about the wet environments of early Mars and may hold clues about whether the planet ever offered conditions favorable for life.

The rolling laboratory will search for two things: environments where life might have existed, and the capacity of those environments to preserve evidence of past life.

"We're proud to work hand-in-hand with NASA... we are honored to be able to test and validate this mission's most critical portion, landing on the Red Planet," Jere Carroll, general manager, civilian agencies, Dell Federal, has stated.