Case Study: Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) achieves agile mission planning and continuous Mars rover deployments with Jira Software

Atlassian visits Mars, courtesy of NASA

The Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL), part of NASA, develops robotic spacecraft to explore the solar system. Working with partners at Ames and Johnson Space Center, JPL must handle high-stakes, distributed challenges—mission planning, parsing daily raw data from spacecraft like the Curiosity rover, and building visual maps of rover progress—all while coordinating teams across multiple locations and tight timelines.

To solve this, JPL created the Ensemble platform and adopted Atlassian tools—Jira and Confluence for project and requirements management and Fisheye, Clover and Bamboo for code quality and continuous delivery. A thousand‑CPU transient compute hive processes Curiosity’s daily data in hours, and Bamboo-powered CI/CD pipelines build, test and deploy code from multiple branches into JPL’s private cloud—enabling rapid, reliable updates so engineers can deliver changes to a Mars rover within days.

Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL)

Dave Mittman

Lead Software Developer