^ Spirit’s eye view of Mars landing site. Image credit: NASA/JPL.

Spirit has succeeded where Beagle2 has faltered. Via /. I’ve found Maestro:

“NASA has released Maestro, a public version of the primary software tool used by scientists to operate the Mars Exploration Rovers from the Jet Propulsion Laboratory. Anyone can download Maestro for free from http://mars.telascience.org and use it to follow along with the rovers’ progress during the mission. You can use Maestro to view pictures from Mars in 2D and 3D and create simplified rover activity plans. During the mission, updates will be released for Maestro containing the latest images from Mars.”

Just downloaded it [via bitorrent! cool!], but haven’t played with it yet. Telepresence for the masses is a great idea to get people excited about NASA’s mission again; which of course they pioneered back with Sojourner [Carnegie Mellon Robot hall-of-fame page here, lego version here]. Maybe it’s the beginning of the grid-distributed telemetric exploration of space I mooted in “Why starfleet”.