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

funding possibility

[passion]

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.

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?

Re:funding possibility

[elefantstn]

When can NASA expect your check in the mail?

Every April 15.

Most science research these days makes me sad

[Dark Paladin]

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.

New Unit of Project Cost Measure?

[Speare]

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)?

uh, not quite

[tunabomber]

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.

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!

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.

My "plan" to save NASA (or space exploring anyway)

[aengblom]

Not mentioned, it cost less than the making of even a medium-sized Hollywood movie.

[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 ;-).

Damn five years...

[Ektanoor]

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????

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

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."

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. :)