Technology used to plan the next Mars mission is catching up with the technology of the spacecraft themselves. Engineers at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory plan to use a giant plasma-screen electronic "whiteboard," based on IBM technology, to evaluate data captured by the 2003 Mars Exploration Rovers (MERs) once they have arrived on the Red Planet.

Inspired by IBM's BlueBoard technology, the screens are referred to as MERBoards (Mars Exploration Rover Boards), says Jay Trimble, head of the MERBoard design team.

The two MERBoards now in place are based on the same concept as IBM's devices and use much of the same commercial office hardware. However, the MERBoards are tailored to the needs of JPL scientists and engineers and run on software written at NASA's Ames Research Center.

"It's not that we saw shortcomings with the traditional ways of communicating. We just saw that we could make it better," Trimble said. "You can use a whiteboard very effectively to communicate among people, but this adds the ability to import different data types."

Instead of the transparencies that were often used during the planning phase of the Pathfinder mission, scientists and engineers can now display images on a 50-inch plasma monitor with touch-screen capabilities. The MERBoards are connected to controller computers that are then linked to a single network server.

Multiple users can log on to a MERBoard with a swipe of a keycard. Each user is then represented on the desktop-like screen by a personal icon. A user has access to an individual storage space, or MERSpace. MER team members can then use the boards for presentations they have saved on their MERSpace, "instead of having to tote your laptop and your projector with you," Trimble said.

Groups can also meet around the MERBoard. Individuals can mark up images on the screen, which can be viewed in real time on other MERBoards. The images can then be saved for future access and shared via a drag and drop feature or via email to a wider audience.

The MERBoard can also be used as a traditional whiteboard, not with non-toxic markers, but with fingers, a stylus or a keyboard.

Ames first presented the board to JPL in January and MER scientists and engineers have been testing it during the mission's planning phase and offering suggestions for improvement. It has proven useful.

"It's easy to use," says MER Mission Operations Manager and Pathfinder team member Andy Mishkin. "It is really, in a sense, an electronic flipchart where it's making it possible for people to present things and annotate them and send them to others during meetings and discussions."

For future stages of mission operations, "we're still kind of coming up with ways that we're going to be using it," Mishkin says. But he sees it as one of a "suite of tools" that will be used "to generate commands very rapidly and to go from the original science intent to the commands that implement that intent."

For example, MER rover will travel to rocks much like Pathfinder's Sojourner rover did, though the twin MER rovers will be equipped with instruments including a rock abrasion tool -- or RAT -- that will scrape away the weathered outer surface. As the images come in, scientists will have to choose the most interesting and viable objects to examine, and the MERBoard, in conjunction with software that JPL is creating, should help the groups make these decisions.

"I view the MERBoard as really enhancing our process," Mishkin says.

While the MERBoard is certainly an upgrade over paper and pen technology, sometimes the old-fashioned method has its own advantages. Pathfinder team members, to officially give rocks at the landing site names such as Yogi, Wedge and Squid, wrote them on sticky-notes and placed them on a large panoramic printout. The poster was eventually laminated and given to the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, D.C.