Case Study: NASA achieves rapid Mars-rover software delivery with Atlassian

Atlassian Visits Mars, Courtesy of NASA

The Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL), part of NASA and working with the Ames and Johnson Space Centers, develops robotic spacecraft such as the Curiosity Mars rover. Their distributed teams in Pasadena, Mountain View and Houston face complex challenges: mission planning, parsing daily telemetry, compiling visual maps and coordinating work across locations to operate unmanned explorers remotely.

To solve this they built the Ensemble project and adopted Atlassian tools—Jira and Confluence for planning and requirements, and Fisheye, Clover and Bamboo for code quality and continuous delivery. The toolchain powers a fast pipeline into JPL’s private cloud so teams process a day’s Mars data in hours, push daily task lists, and deploy rapid software updates—enabling agile operations where code written Monday can be driving rovers on Mars by Tuesday.

NASA

Dave Mittman

Lead Software Developer