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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.
The U.S. has sent how many manned missions to the moon, and how many to Mars? Yeah, I know the space race is over, and it's a whole lot farther to Mars than the moon, but still... it seems it's about time. We don't seem to have much luck with surface probes on the red planet, so maybe the only way to get anything done is send real astronauts.
Of course, with the recent metric/imperial conversion error, I'd hate to be in the first crew to touch down...
Have you been stalked by Seth today?
Not mentioned, it cost less than the making of even a medium-sized Hollywood movie.
So all we have to do is put CAMERAS on the next one and we can sell the rights to hollywood. That way we get a nice large investment from the movie industry, then when we get all the footage they can edit it all together into a REAL space adventure.
Well, if it cost less than a Hollywood picture, why not push it a little further? Seriously, NASA could pull my dollars directly if they were to include an IMAX camera setup on their future space missions, then put together a work of art to display in the theater... that's how they can privatize and overcome congressional budget limitations.
- passion
Mars is the future. I was reading on NASA's webpage about two missions in the next two years that will send rovers to the surface again to explore around. I think something like that is needed, gets everyone interested and excited.
It's not the OS it's the user that sucks. If it's user friendly, you get stupider people. - clinko
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
It's interesting to consider that the Pathfinder mission cost less than a "medium sized Hollywood movie" project, but is that really a valuable measure?
I remember the same sort of comparison made about the first Jurassic Park movie, where more money went into that one movie than in all dinosaur archaeology spending... ever.
But what does that tell us? Scientists are more thrifty than Hollywood? Hollywood is the definition of excess... "larger than life" has been its motto since day one. Or maybe that the market for movies is wider than the market for scientific progress? Well, science is funded by government and philanthropy, while movie-making is funded by Joe Sixpack and his family of teenagers who frankly don't give a shit about science, except for the D- that Becky Sixpack got last semester.
Why not find suitable comparisons between opposites. To recycle an old joke, Progress versus Congress? How much money went into the last election cycle? How much money went into purchasing the DMCA which further entrenches the Hollywood regime?
Will the Gulf War II cost more money than Rambo II or Superman II or Star Wars Episode 2? Will the special effects (either in terms of the decisively televised explosions or the new cinematic masterpieces unfolding in the election-year stump speeches)?
[
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. :)
I am curious about scientific reports of Mars. I have heard and read that there was water on Mars, and that the chance for life having existed (or still) is very high.
Yet, at the same time, I hear reports that these stories are simply fabricated to get more funding for deep space research.
Does anyone know with any certainty that what we are hearing is valid? And, for the record, I don't care if there was life on Mars, I think we should explore the planet, and fund these and other scientific ventures. One of man's strength is his curiousity and desire to explore.
They stuck me in an institution, said it was the only solution, to...protect me from the enemy, myself
One part of the Pathfinder landing was spun off in a movie, so I figure that was pretty dramatic.
The crash landing of the crew module in the movie Red Planet used airbags to cushion their landing, just as Pathfinder did.
Their landing was not without incident, however. The crew ended up diassembling the Sojourner rover (without using the project or rover name anytime in the movie--copyright concerns?) for its comm module to make an emergency communicator.
A good movie to waste a little time, if only to see Carrie-Anne Moss semi-nude for a moment. Hubba-hubba. Now THERE'S fine Canadian engineering.
Better than Mission to Mars in terms of believability, and not as much of a downer movie.
Vos teneo officium eram periculosus ut vos recipero is.
Assisted by an 11- meter (36-foot) diameter parachute, the spacecraft descended to the surface of Mars and landed, using airbags for the first time to cushion the impact....The spacecraft hit the ground at a speed of about 18 meters per second (40 miles per hour) and bounced about 16 times across the landscape before coming to a halt.
I am no "rocket scientist" but I do know that if you cushion a falling object by using airbags that it will bounce. I wonder if they took the gravitational pull of Mars and figured out the speed that the pathfinder would fall and then calculated how much "cushion" was needed to come to a safe landing.
I wonder if this falls into the catergory "What were they thinking?"
Not mentioned, it cost less than the making of even a medium-sized Hollywood movie.
That's strange- I read that the total mission cost $265 million - more than Titanic cost to make. Still, at $1 a citizen, I think it was worth it.
pi = 3.141592653589793helpimtrappedinauniversefactory7
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!
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.
mogorific carpentry experiments
Each rover will photograph and return to Earth a picture of each DVD disk of names as they rest on the Martian surface.
Why is the rover taking a picture of the DVD as it rest on the Mars surface? Isn't there better things to take a picture of? Why is it littering Mars? How many DVD will each rover have? There is also no way to read the DVD of names through a picture unless the names are scratched onto the DVD. Interesting, but I don't want to be fined for littering Mars.
[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
XV - Unregistered Copy
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????
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).
Flamebait
Serious inquiries only.
Let me make a prediction, if I may... By 2025, in addition to having been to near earth asteroids to gather space resources, we will have people living on the moon, and have sent two teams to Mars and will be exploring the possibilities of putting a permanent residence there. Whether this will be done by federal agencies or the private sector remains to be seen. I am just fairly certain that someone will be doing it.
Liora
I remember the incredibly dire BBC coverage of Pathfinder. It was hosted by comedian/chat-show host Clive Anderton and was embarrasingly bad. Upper-class twit of the year Anderton kept comparing the Pathfinder to a toy truck and having a jolly old chuckle about the whole thing, and the few scientists and astronomers on the programme looked increasingly horrified and ashamed as the programme went on.
Once upon a time the BBC would have treated such a thing with respect, but that was a travesty and showed just how dumbed down they had become. In the five years since, science programming on the BBC has not improved.
If it wasn't for Patrick Moore's long running programme "The Sky At Night" there would be no astronomy programming on British TV at all.
"Information wants to be paid"
Funny. Whenever an interesting news story pops up on the top of Google News SciTech page, you can expect it to be posted on /. an hour or two later.
Can this be automated -- to avoid the crush of duplicate submissions the editors must now be getting?
Software Wars
Spaceship
Homing and
Interplanetary
Tracking
Homing
Apparatus for
Provided
Planetary
Exploration /
Negligence
System
SHIT HAPPENS realizes that probes sometimes fail, and therefore they launch two probes concurrently. If both probes make it there, they can gather more information, and if only one of them makes it there, that's better than nothing.
After all, without SHIT HAPPENS, shit apparently does happen to NASA.
/^[A-Z0-9._%+-]+@[A-Z0-9.-]+\.[A-Z]{2,4}$/i
According to the FAQ at mars.jpl.nasa.gov, the batteries were not rechargeable.
"I'm not impatient. I just hate waiting." - My Dad
I don't remember any Big Debate about RTGs, just a few lunatic fringe whiners. If they actually influenced NASA policy that heavily, then that is absolutely sickening.
As copyright owner of this comment, I authorize everyone to defeat any technological measure which limits access to it.
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.
.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."
Said QTVR movie was embedded into a
__ Someday, but not this morning, I'll finally learn to use the preview button.
there already is an IMAX movie of the ISS, in 3-D no less :)
Liberal (adj.): Free from bigotry; open to progress; tolerant of others.
I was intrigued by the casual statement, "Even launch has a 5 times out of 100 chance of blowing up."
What category of "launches" does this apply to? Is the Delta II rocket that was used to launch the Pathfinder much less reliable than the Space Shuttle? Or should we assume that the chances of a Space Shuttle or Proton blowing up on launch are roughly in the same ballpark?
(At the time of the Challenger disaster, Feynman said something to the effect working engineers estimated the Space Shuttle odds at 1/100, while NASA management estimated them at 1/100,000...)
"How to Do Nothing," kids activities, back in print!
If we want to do things right we need to start spending money, we will get it back indirectly the same was we got it back from Apollo, through innovations which will bennifit us all. We should focus on a Lunar station in the next 12 years, and not this international stuff (as seen with the russians and the ISS this is nothing but trouble), build an American Station there and let other nations pay for use if they like, but it will be our station (Kind of like the russians let us do with Mir).
But this would be expensive and John and Jane taxpayer would rather have their money spen on congressional pork which they would see small returns today instead of giving them up for larger gains tommorow.
Just my 2 cents..
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.
I got the same question. Yeah, the envirol00nz really did take over the airwaves.
My answer was "Because it's not just the best technology for the job, it's the only technology for the job, and we've done it dozens of times before. Oh yeah, and just what do you think we spewed into the atmosphere during the dozens of surface, air, and space-burst nuke tests back in the 50s? If these envirofscks were even close to reality, we'd have all died 20 years ago."
> You have to remember who was at the helm of NASA for 10 years, Goldin did whatever was necessary to make him look good.
Yep. And he was a complete failure at that, too.
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. :)
Ant(Dude) @ Quality Foraged Links (AQFL.net) & The Ant Farm (antfarm.ma.cx / antfarm.home.dhs.org).
The difficult part about taking hi-res images is getting them back to earth. Using the best radio communication technology we have, we can receive only a handful of KB/sec from a remote probe in the inner solar system. In the outer solar system we are limited to more like a couple hundred bytes a second. And then there are overheads, like control commands and non-image science data. If the probe is on a planet then we can only receive when Earth is abobe its horizon. (unless we use a relay satellite...)
I believe modern missions use light compression on the images before transmitting them back, but scientists are naturally reluctant to use any fancy compression algorithms for fear of skewing the data.
Our best hope for the future is optical-wavelength communication, which could theoretically push data rates into megabytes per second.
BTW you want eye candy? Check out my Mars Rover video =).
The Soujournor rover was the first use of Chipkill Memory from IBM. It's now in a good portion of Serverworks chipsets that are in most vendor's servers (IBM, HP, Dell, Others).
Kinda cool saying that a portion of your servers memory controller 'came from Mars'
As a rock-in-roll Physicist once said, No matter where you go, there you are.
Just curious, but how can the bandwidth be so tight? More to the point: How much would it cost to increase? Just seems like real-time fantastic video/audio/images would be a huge pr win because they would be in the mainstream "look what shuttle Columbia did today" press.
So close and yet so far from the world's perfect ID number
Woudl stress out any battery. Also dust on the solar cells degrades charging.
Two rovers arrive on Mars in Jan 2004, assuming NASA's unreliable delivery system makes it. These are larger, golf-cart size rovers. They have some A.I. capability to avoid obstacles not programmed by earth, via intermidable 20-minute delays. Then they'll be able to go a hundred meters a day, or several miles over their lifetimes.
I should probably defer to the experts on this question; I'm not a NASA engineer =).
My guess- in order to increase the bandwidth, the spacecraft needs to carry a larger, more powerful transmitter. This adds weight and power consumption, two resources that are extremely scarce in spacecraft design.
If you are in low earth orbit, however, it's not impossible to get real-time, high-bandwidth video. One of my clients is a company that specializes in this kind of thing: Ecliptic Enterprises.
.. untiltil we go and get the Pathfinder back so I can take a look at it in the Smithsonian.
Live web cams
here
Live web cams
(* Wasn't Pathfinder launch earlier than Cassini? I thought Cassini was in late '97 *)
IIRC, it was the Galellio Jupiter probe that caused the biggest fuss. (Don't put nukes on something that is too hard to spell.)
Table-ized A.I.
> You have to remember who was at the helm of NASA for 10 years, Goldin did whatever was necessary to make him look good.
Yep. And he was a complete failure at that, too.
Damn, you guys are harsh...Goldin did a pretty good job, IMO.
Liberal (adj.): Free from bigotry; open to progress; tolerant of others.
One of your links suggest that there is a small chance that the rover got confused and could be traveling way out from the lander even today. If wind erases its trails, it may never be found again (if Mars became heavily colonized, for example). Although that is not a very likely scenario.
Table-ized A.I.
The other problem, of course, would be transmitting the data back...you'd need some heavy bandwidth and the Shannon(?) theorem would also suggest you'd need a powerful transmitter...
Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from a rigged demo
--Andy Finkel (J. Klass?)
While I agree with virtually everything you have said, I still believe in having a choice.
And I do use Linux in a desktop environment.
Sorry to disappoint you.
"Rocky Rococo, at your cervix!"