James Gosling, the father of Java and a “Fellow” and vice president at Sun Labs, will introduce a new, Linux/Java-powered Mars rover prototype at JavaOne today in San Francisco. The Mars Exploration Rover concept vehicle was built by NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) as a proof of concept for the next-generation of unmanned Mars… exploration rovers, scheduled for launch in 2009.

JPL is demonstrating the use of Java-based applications executed on a real-time Linux platform as an alternative to C/C++ applications on VxWorks, a traditional commercial real-time operating system. The concept vehicle's real-time Linux/Java software platform consists of TimeSys Linux/Real-Time, along with TimeSys JTime, the first RTSJ-compliant Java virtual machine (JVM).

 
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