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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.
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
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)?
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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!
[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
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
Liberal (adj.): Free from bigotry; open to progress; tolerant of others.