The keynote speaker at SIGGRAPH 2016 was Nagin Cox, of NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory. She gave a wonderful talk. And produced my favorite quote of the conference.
You might think that there is a big difference between space scientists and computer scientists. But as she described running a team of brilliant engineers to put a rover on Mars, or to send space probes to Jupiter, I realized that there are more commonalities than differences.
One quote summed it up nicely. As Dr. Cox explained that the journey of the Mars Rover from the Earth to the red planet took seven months, she explained the “just in time” style of creating software for different parts of the ambitious voyage.
“We don’t need to have the landing software written when we launch,” she said. “We just need to have it written when we land.”