http://www.sys-con.com/story/?storyid=39220&DE=1

When the NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory's (JPL) Mars Exploration Rover,
Spirit, successfully landed on Mars on January 3, 2004, Java was there too.
The Mars Rovers devices, developed by the NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory
(JPL) in conjunction with Wind River, use Java as a low-cost, easy-to-use
operating system.
Why Java? James Gosling, JPL advisory board member and "Father of Java,"
explains that it's due to Java's ability to transcend many platforms. "They
can have scientists all over the world looking at the data but
collaboratively deciding on the way the mission should proceed," said
Gosling. "They are all speaking different languages when they talk to the
rover but everybody in the control room is using Java."

Spirit is sending as much as 150 megabits of data daily to NASA scientists,
and that datastream will increase when the sister rover, Opportunity, lands
on January 24. To deal with this data, Sun Microsystems and NASA built four
operational storage servers at the JPL that altogether can hold four
terabytes of data.

The Java program used on the robotic rovers is nearly identical to the JPL's
online program Maestro that allows site visitors to guide a simulated rover
across a 3-D Martian terrain. (To try out the Java-based data browser
Maestro and drive a simulated dune buggy on Mars, see
http://mars.telascience.org/.)
...

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