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

Celestia

[ajs]

I have a hard time talking about Mars or any other space-related topic now and not thinking about Celestia, which I installed on my Linux-based-laptop last night and spent hours using to explore the solar system, nearby stars and distant galaxies. It's a breath-taking display of what computers should be all about, and IMHO should be a tool in every grade school and high school in the country, which is then used to generate the next wave of Mars and near-solor-system exploration interest!

Check it out, and enjoy!

Re:OT - Lost comm with Pathfinder?

[bwohlgemuth]

The Pathfinder lander used a set of rechargable batteries that were designed only to withstand the cold nights of Mars for 30 days. The fact that we got over 60 days of useful data from the lander is a testament to the craft's designers and builders.

The reason that both Viking landers were on for years was due to the RTGs (Radioisotope Thermoelectric Generators) which generated electicity from the decay of plutonium. NASA didn't want to launch RTGs again after the big debate of the Cassini mission (and yes, I know Pathfinder did have minute amount of plutonium located in certain places to keep the craft warm).

Re:What do they expect?

[LMCBoy]

That "rare combination of luck" comment was completely inappropriate and misleading. Of course the lander was supposed to bounce and roll around, that was its design, and it was brilliant.

Problem: How do you safely and cheaply deliver a somewhat fragile payload to the surface of Mars?

+ Rockets? Really expensive, both in terms of cash and (perhaps most importantly) payload mass.

+ Parachute? Martian atmosphere's too thin to slow the payload sufficiently.

+ Deployable glider wings? Really complicated, therefore prone to failure. Also see Rockets entry.

Their solution: do the best you can with a 'chute, then deploy a cocoon of bouncy airbags to cushion the impact. Let the lander bounce, safely shedding mv**2 each time, until it comes to a rest.

If it happened to land upside-down, it had a mechanism to right itself. However, it landed "jelly-side-up", which I assume is what the article poster meant by "rare combination of luck". Since this made no difference anyway, I fail to see the relevance.

Anyway, you can see cool images and animations regarding the entry, landing and deployment of Pathfinder here: http://mars.sgi.com/mpf/edl/edl1.html

The Mars Polar Lander Failure in STQE Magazine...

[antdude]

In Volume 4, Issue 5 (September/October 2002) issue of Software Testing & Quality Engineering Magazine (article is not online), there is an article about the Mars Polar Lander (MPL) Failure. It is on page 12. It talked about the design failure from this premature shutdown. It was an interesting read on what happened with the software that failed and how it was discovered. :)