Time. It's a precious resource. Just ask the hundreds of scientists and engineers who collaborate to choose a rover's next best move.

This is more difficult than it sounds. During a Mars rover mission there are no joysticks. The rovers are too far from Earth to be remotely controlled in real time.

Instead, each day, ground support teams crunch piles of data into meaningful information. They debate exploration strategies that will get them more information and build software code that tells the rovers what to do and how to do it.

"They have a very tightly scheduled day," said Ames Research Center's Information Design Group lead Joan Walton.

Meanwhile, in a sense, time is changing. The teams work around the clock, in Mars time - a 24-hour, 37-minute day - in a 24-hour world, while operating rovers on opposite sides of Mars.

To keep the teams up to speed and coordinated during the mission, the Mars Exploration Rover Collaborative Information Portal (CIP) is a hub and distribution center for essential information. Using CIP mission staff can determine in a glance the time of day in any time zone on Mars or on Earth. On almost any computer, through an interface custom built for the mission, a team member can quickly find relevant reports, images, daily schedules and plans stored in numerous databases.

"CIP is a one-stop location where science and operations teams go to find out what's going on," CIP project manager John Schreiner said. "CIP maps all the mission information and presents it to users in a very intuitive interface without the user needing to know data formats or where the data is stored."

Science team member Morten Bo Madsen called CIP "indispensable." Mission planner Elaina McCartney relies on CIP to track time. "I would be helpless without CIP."

The Information Design Group started developing CIP after talking with team members from the 1997 Pathfinder Mars exploration mission and current mission staff. The staff expressed concern about managing the vast collection of information and incoming data while coordinating 240 scientists and engineers.

The CIP team came up with a system that can meet the needs of workers with different requirements, distributing information while the rovers collect and transmit data from Mars.

"They have a lot of specialized tools they need to do their science," Walton said. "This system has pulled together information from different places that might be difficult for them to get on their own."

For example, say that after a weekend a geologist punches in just as a meeting has ended. That person can find out what happened. That person can also find out what each team is working on, the condition and location of the rovers and the status of the planning and scheduling process.

CIP lets a user subscribe to information. Say the geologist is hoping a rover will return an image of what might have once been a Martian riverbed, and so are other people. The tool realizes when a document is in demand and makes it available. CIP can notify those people when new images and reports come in.

CIP is being used with another Computational Sciences Division technology, the MERBoard, a combination software and large touchscreens that enables team members to collaboratively view, share and annotate information.

The Computational Sciences Division's Information Design Group developed MERCIP. NASA's Information Systems and Computing, Networking and Information Systems projects, within the agency's Computing Information and Communications Technology program, provided funding.