"They've really done a lot for the agency to make people think it's cool to work at NASA again," says senior computer scientist Chris Mattmann, who works at Jet Propulsion Laboratories (JPL), one of ten NASA centres.

Mattmann is speaking at the on November 8 at the Viaduct Events Centre. He has worked for NASA since he was an undergraduate at the University of Southern California, when he took a part time academic position.

While not directly involved in the Curiosity mission, Mattmann has worked on Apache (the open source software foundation) data processing and information integration software projects that help power NASA's planetary data system -- the archive for all its space missions.

Mattmann became involved in Nutch, an open source search engine program, when studying for his doctorate. Nutch was created by Doug Cutting, who went on to found the big data system Hadoop.

Cutting was inspired to create Nutch because of a frustration with the 'black box' approach that Google had towards its search technology.