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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.
seemed a rare combination of luck (bounced 16 times and landed on its base petal)
It was either luck, or more calculations of 'rocket science' than you'll ever comprehend.
I look back at the days when people were racing to the moon - sure, it was for the really good reason of "Well, um, we have to beat the Russians!", but still, it was there. Look at the incredible explosion of technology that happened during the Moon program - new materials, computers growing smaller for space - we're still benefitting to this day.
But now, nobody wants to fund science unless it "makes something useful". Which is well and good - without practical science, we'd still be wearing bushes for shorts.
But science progresses from the accidents - looking at the mold eating your sugars, and trying to figure out why the bacteria don't kill it. Looking at a clock and wondering what would happen if you left it at the speed of light.
We get minimul funding for projects like Supercolliders, which could reveal who knows what amazing secrets to the universe? What if one of those secrets was anti-gravity, or a huge breakthrough in quantum computing we never would have found if we hadn't just gone "Damn - let's just see what it is for no other reason than we can." We should be going to Mars - for no reason greater than saying "I don't know - because it's there". The scientific benefits of such endeavors would be huge.
But I don't see that happening until we're pretty much forced off this rock by overpopulation or pollution or trying to find a new way to get rid of criminals or something. And then the new advances will come - about the time I can start getting biogrown teeth.
52 Weeks, 52 Religions with John Hummel
An IMAX picture from a rover on mars. Imagine that. It'd be like you were standing on the planet. Killer idea.
[Granted I am ignoring the fact that you should include the costs of risks for the not lucky projects that failed to find real cost of a mars mission, but this is thought provoking]
You see, I am a photo editor at a major web site. I also love space photos. People love space photos. (One is winning here at MSNBC right now(not my site). But every time we see astronauts we get low-quality tv screenshots. My god NASA take a pittance of your multi-$billion budget and buy some high res cameras. Most people don't really care that we now know that "Martian dust includes magnetic, composite particles, with a mean size of one micron. " Most people like eye candy. Give it to them!
Step 1
- Find a way to transmit at least STILLS at high res. Maybe talk to Canon or Kodak
Step 2- Bring someone else up with you. Make it be IMAX. Make them pay. *I* can't afford even a half price ticket through Russia's program. I'll pay to see ISS IMax.
The first industry will be tourism, the first step is the travel channel's review.I think someone pinched my pet peeve
So close and yet so far from the world's perfect ID number
5 years ago this one was the biggest and broadest Internet event since the the Web-Bang. Millions of people from around the world were roaming NASA's site. They had to create several mirrors and upgrade bandwith to hold up the crowd.
But still the bozos can't get to the idea that there are lots of people wondering for the "final frontier". Frankly NASA and its political mandarins did several things as if trying to desmise this all-world will. Today, many lost interest not only for Mars but also for anything that sounds "Space". Things went so far that many major mass media nearly wiped out their Science/Technology headlines from the front pages of their sites.
Personally I would congratulate NASA on turning Mars into the most boring, aired and dry place of our Solar System. And not because of the fact that "Science is a hard and long way of discovery". On the contrary. You killed the mood for this:
Your sites on Mars look as if only retarded children have some interest on these things.
You laughed, laughed and laughed over everyone. Maybe you don't have anything to do on creating "Elvis leaving the stage and Bigfoot coming up on Mars". But you did exploit this cheap, raw and stupid humour against a mass of people you could be ideologically wrong but wanted to get a more serious criticism or clarification.
You have put everyone who didn't agree with you in one pan. And tried to cook them in various ways. However you were no less dogmatic and stubborn. Let's remind the trouble you had when Pathfinder's site did show that the fable "old, old, dry and lifeless Mars" blowed with the first images. How many times you went further and back with that story? Only with after some MGS frames you stopped this old and btw unscientific line. Yes, unscientific, because it was born from some Prof. "Dodo" Horowitz that couldn't even respect the death of his colleague in attempting to rise the heights of a "scientific authority".
Well there are many other things to remember but I'll just will leave one... Just one. For NASA guys, who may see this:
YOU PROMISED IN BIG HEADERS THAT YOU WOULD PUBLISH AN ESTIMATION FOR THE CONTENT OF CARBON IN THE ROCKS AFTER "CALIBRATING" THE RESULTS OF ROCK ANALYSIS!!!!
Well five damn years passed!!! WHERE ARE THE ESTIMATIONS????
Agreed.
My beef with NASA is that once they find a brilliant solution to a problem that works perfectly, they rarely, if ever, use it again.
"Congratulations, you solved the Mars landing problem cheaper, better, and faster. Now we're going to deploy our next lander the old-fashioned way. Heck, we'll even use old-fashioned units of measurement!"
Seemingly in parallel with this, once NASA finds an expensive solution to a problem, they keep it going for decades. The Shuttle and ISS are perfect examples of this.
Meantime, haven't these guys heard of an economy of scale? Would it have been that much more expensive to build 2, 3, or 10 Pathfinders instead of one? (I dunno, maybe - but there's a point at which it would have been cheaper to mass-produce 'em.) Keep the spares in storage and launch 'em as vehicles become available on the cheap.
(Hell, let some engineering students build a whole bunch on the cheap and use the MIRV approach on a heavy-lift vehicle to lob 10 of 'em at Mars simultaneously per launch window, thereby cutting construction costs and overwhelming the Martian space defence initiative with sheer numbers :-)
Imax is a large film guage. The cameras are heavy and expensive. Plus it eats film like you can't imagine.
So now that you shot the film on the planet - how would get the film back from Planet X so you can process it in the labs. And if you can get the film back (most likely at great expense) why not bring back a sample return instead?
Just some thoughts.
but still... it seems it's about time.
I'm sure others will say it, but it's an absolutely massive step from the Moon to Mars [for a manned misson]. Even if you ignore the huge difference in distance (Mars is about 100 times further away at the point of closest approach than the Moon is), there are still some gigantic hurdles to overcome.
One of the biggest hurdles to long-distance space travel is the degeneration of bone in low gravity atmosphere. It's extremely important in prolonged exposure to zero-g - human bone wastes away and becomes weaker, and we don't really know that much about how to reverse the effect. Excercise helps a bit, but the amount of effort required is significant for such a small gain. Account for a 3 month journey to Mars, even if you stay there for only a few weeks, factor in a return journey and you are talking about spending 9 months or so in very low gravity.
"Because it's there." - George Mallory, when asked why he wanted to climb Mt Everest, March 18, 1923 (New York Times)
Actually, JPL is using a Pathfinder-like airbag landing system for the 2003 Mars Exploration Rover.
Of course, this hasn't been without its problems - for starters, they really were lucky that Pathfinder worked: there were problems with the bridle deployment, and several other potentially catastrophic things that could have happened, but luckily didn't. Also, trying to redesign the somewhat limited airbag/parachute system to deal with the larger, more complex MER mission has not been without difficulties.
The airbag system worked well for its intended purpose (ultra-cheap, quick 'n dirty mission), but a rocket based system is inherently more flexible and provides much more control during the landing phase. That's why it was selected for Polar Lander, which had to land in some fairly constrained terrain. Incidentally, the problem with MPL was a flag variable that was not reset prior to entering the loop controlling rocket firing, not a units issue. You are conflating the MPL failure problem with the earlier Mars orbiter that had a units problem during its approach to Mars (and that problem was actually the fault of the contractor, Lockheed Martin, not NASA or JPL - the contract specified metric units, the contractor used English units anyway).
NASA has heard of economies of scale. Congress has not. Building 10 identical Pathfinders may be cheaper than building 10 separate missions, but trying to pitch a single program that costs 10 times as much as most other missions is a losing battle. Congress does not care what things cost in the long run, they care about the current years budget. They will consciously make decisions that will cause programs to cost more in the long run if it will save money this fiscal cycle.