Five Year Retrospective: Mars Pathfinder

An anonymous reader writes "Five years ago today, on September 27, 1997, NASA and the Jet Propulsion Laboratory began to lose communication with the Mars Pathfinder and ended its highly successful mission. The interview with Matt Golombek, Project Scientist, highlights Mars' warm and wet past. The still remarkable landing sequence, with first signal only 3 minutes after touchdown, seemed a rare combination of luck (bounced 16 times and landed on its base petal). Not mentioned, it cost less than the making of even a medium-sized Hollywood movie." NASA is getting ready to publish their future plans for deep-space missions.

Comments

The one draw back from the Mars mission...

[Vermy]

Was that they never brought back any DNA for us to create an evil Natasha Henstridge to have hardcore alien sex with all of us. :)

Mars landing was faked

[wackybrit]

seemed a rare combination of luck

Of course it did, the Mars Pathfinder experiment was faked, in much the same way as the moon landing was.

If you watch the documentary 'Mission To Mars', this is proven as no Pathfinder is visible in the scenes shot on Mars. The Pathfinder did not find any evidence of the obelisk which created the dust storm in the documentary, leading to human's first contact with an alien race in the late 90's.

The moon landing as seen in 1969 was also faked, as proven by the compelling documentary '2001' which some of you may have seen. The US already had a base on the moon by 1969 and a large black monolith was found. An ELIZA-esque robot and a crew of astronauts was sent to investigate a radio beam being emitted from the monolith, on which an astronaut was sucked into a wormhole and suddenly appeared in a hotel in New York.

Re:Mars and the Moon

[Saint Aardvark]

Actually, I keep wondering why McDonald's doesn't send colonists to Mars. God knows they must have the money, and think of the advertising potential: just offer free Big Macs to any Martians you meet.

And if you think we got a lot of good technology from NASA's efforts to reach the moon, just wait and see what McD's comes up with:

• low gravity friers
• radiation-proof Kiddy PlayLands
• Ronald McDonald wigs that stay put during Martian sandstorms
• potatoes genetically engineered to grow on Mars
• cows genetically engineered to grow on Mars (added bonus: terraforming gas)

Hell, we're backing the wrong horse here, people: it's time to send McDonald's to space!

-AND- It advertised shareware!

[ishmalius]

I remember when JPL was showing a workstation in the control center displaying an image, the program displaying it read on the dragbar:

XV - Unregistered Copy

...which should be familiar to a LOT of Unix users!

Re:funding possibility

[Betelgeuse]

NASA could pull my dollars directly if they were to include an IMAX camera setup on their future space missions

Done.

When can NASA expect your check in the mail?

One of my favorite net pranks

[bobdotorg]

The summer of the Pathfinder mission, a friend of mine who works at Caltech / JPL used a 17MB panaromic jpeg to create a QTVR (Quicktime Virtual Reality) movie of the Martian landscape around the Pathfinder.

Said QTVR movie was embedded into a .caltech.edu web page entitled, "Control the Mars Pathfinder camera", with a note, "This page will take a few minutes to load because of the time it takes for radio signals to reach Mars and return."

Re:funding possibility

[elefantstn]

When can NASA expect your check in the mail?

Every April 15.