One of my editors, Oliver Morton, pointed me to this article — a business magazine story about IT demands on NASA. According to the story, NASA only recently became equipped to deal with the public’s demands for fresh mission images. As of 2002, the NASA Web site was being operated by a single server in a basement.

It was really the 2004 landings of the Mars rovers Spirit and Opportunity — the first Mars landing in the modern internet age — that forced NASA to dramatically ramp up its Web infrastructure. That year, there were 60 million unique visitors, and 330 terabytes of rover data were served to the public, the story says. Now NASA IT managers are expecting perhaps twice as much demand. You can even watch Phoenix land within Second Life.

And Ray Arvidson, pictured here, has seen this Internet arc firsthand. At this point, he has spent more time on Mars as a mission scientist than anyone else, serving on the Viking and rover missions as well as Phoenix. As the deputy PI for the rovers, he watched as their daily trundlings, disseminated via the Internet, captivated the public.

He finds all the changes staggering when he thinks back to the Viking missions in the 1970s. “We didn’t have PCs, we didn’t have Macs,” he says. “We did everything on paper.”

Calculators were still big, boxy and expensive. Instruction sequences for the landers were written out by hand. Returned images were printed out on film for viewing since color computer monitors didn’t really exist.

I told Ray that he seems to be a bit calmer than everyone else. Maybe it’s because he’s seen it all. “It’s been a total cool ride,” he says.