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Space Science

Five Year Retrospective: Mars Pathfinder 179

Posted by michael from the go-where-no-RC-car-has-gone-before dept.
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.
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Five Year Retrospective: Mars Pathfinder More

Five Year Retrospective: Mars Pathfinder

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  • Luck (Score:1, Insightful)

    by qurob ( 543434 )

    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.
    • 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?"
      • I'm pretty sure the bouncing was intentional.

        I'm sure their design decisions were pretty interesting. They did say that the atmosphere was denser than they had previously thought, so presumable the craft parachuted more slowly than anticipated, all other things being equal. Then again, they adjusted their estimate of the planet's core as well, so all bets are off as far as I know.

      • Re:What do they expect? (Score:5, Informative)

        by LMCBoy ( 185365 ) on Friday September 27, 2002 @11:09AM (#4344678) Homepage Journal
        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
        • > 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.

          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 :-)

          • IIRC, there was some talk about making modular space probes with interchangeable parts. This seems to me the ideal way to go from an economy of scale perspective. You have a single generic probe platform into which you can plug different modules for different missions. Or even a few different base platforms (lander, flyby, atmospheric probe, etc.)

            Don't know if anything ever came of it, but it sure sounded good on paper.
          • 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.

            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.

            • 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.

              I have read that the airbag parts actually weighed more than the equivalent in a fuel-based landing system. They originally didn't think it would weigh as much as it did.

              Some engineers say that fuel-based landing systems still look like a better design in their opinion.

              Unfornuately, it is hard to test both designs in quantity on Mars without spending jillions.
    • seemed a rare combination of luck ... and?

      combinations need at least two things, right?

  • Mars and the Moon (Score:3, Interesting)

    by Drunken Coward ( 574991 ) on Friday September 27, 2002 @10:15AM (#4344254)
    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...
    • Maybe they still haven't really figured out if it were met/imp problems or if it were really the Martian Missle Defense System. ;)

      I'd like to see some manned missions. Perhaps it will become more likely once the International Space Station is finished. That way, they could launch missions from space rather than spending millions of (insert national currency here) on fuel alone.

    • Of course, with the recent metric/imperial conversion error, I'd hate to be in the first crew to touch down...

      Touch down, the landing site would be a very wide area then... compared with 'within 20km' you could say 'over and all around the northern hemisphere' :)

      Yeah, I know the space race is over...

      I just wish someone would start another one, then we might get a bit more progress!

    • Actually, I keep wondering why McDonald's doesn't send colonists to Mars. God knows they must have the money, and think of the advertising potential: just offer free Big Macs to any Martians you meet.

      And if you think we got a lot of good technology from NASA's efforts to reach the moon, just wait and see what McD's comes up with:

      • low gravity friers
      • radiation-proof Kiddy PlayLands
      • Ronald McDonald wigs that stay put during Martian sandstorms
      • potatoes genetically engineered to grow on Mars
      • cows genetically engineered to grow on Mars (added bonus: terraforming gas)

      Hell, we're backing the wrong horse here, people: it's time to send McDonald's to space!

    • We don't seem to have much luck with surface probes on the red planet

      Are you seriously attaching this statement to a story on Mars Pathfinder?

      You can't just go to Mars, it's orders of magnitude more difficult than going to the Moon. We have to send the robots first, they are laying the groundwork: mapping the surface, setting up communication satellites, determining whether there is easily-accessible surface water ice (required for fuel for the trip back). It isn't "about time" to go back, not yet...but we're getting there.
    • 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.

    • Re:Mars and the Moon (Score:3, Interesting)

      by timeOday ( 582209 )
      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.
      It strikes me just the opposite. I wouldn't want to ride to Mars on a system that fails 70% of the time.

  • Movie idea right here (Score:2, Interesting)

    by Anonymous Coward
    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.
  • I remember that summer when the media gave so much attention to the project. Even my grandmother was excited about it. I'm sure it paled in comparision to the first moon missions, but I remember people being excited about the landing. CNN even showed live coverage.

    NASA would win a the hearts of the public (and Congressional support) if they could pull off one of these popular missions every two or three years.
    • 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.
      • I feel I've got to come to the defence of the BBC, here. If you're bored on a Thursday night (or, strictly, Friday morning), watch the Learning Zone. Great stuff. Proper science, and proper maths. The learning zone is great any might, but Thursday is science night. Don't remember what the other days specialise in.
  • Why did they lose communication with the pathfinder and can they get it back?
    • 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).
      • Wasn't Pathfinder launch earlier than Cassini? I thought Cassini was in late '97, after Pathfinder was over.

        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.

        • Cassini was launched after Pathfinder, and the lunatic fringe DID get on the major networks (even causing my mostly space-clueless family to ask "Why the hell are we launching Plutonium on that damn rocket next week?"). I think there was also a financial motive in launching Solar Batteries as opposed to RTGs (Have you seen the price of plutonium these days!).

          You have to remember who was at the helm of NASA for 10 years, Goldin did whatever was necessary to make him look good.
          • > Cassini was launched after Pathfinder, and the lunatic fringe DID get on the major networks (even causing my mostly space-clueless family to ask "Why the hell are we launching Plutonium on that damn rocket next week?").

            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.

            • > 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.
        • (* 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.)
    • The batteries are dead. They were not rechargeable.

  • funding possibility (Score:5, Interesting)

    by passion ( 84900 ) on Friday September 27, 2002 @10:20AM (#4344299)

    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 (Score:2, Insightful)

      by Anonymous Coward
      An IMAX picture from a rover on mars. Imagine that. It'd be like you were standing on the planet. Killer idea.
      • 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 wonder, given $LARGE_AMT, whether an IMAX-quality digital camera is feasible at the moment?

          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...

    • Unfortunatly, congress will disband NASA long before it ever moves itself into the private sector. Asside from that, they'd never do the IMAX thing because whomsoever was producing it would be too afraid of Space Pirates! Oh no! The whole world will have access to this information which belongs to all the people of Earth! What shall we do? We won't make nearly enough! Well, now that I say it like that... it makes sense. Blech. ;)

    • Re:funding possibility (Score:5, Funny)

      by Betelgeuse ( 35904 ) on Friday September 27, 2002 @10:59AM (#4344606) Homepage
      NASA could pull my dollars directly if they were to include an IMAX camera setup on their future space missions

      Done. [space.com]

      When can NASA expect your check in the mail?
    • If you're going to do that, then why have NASA involved at all? Don't write your congressman, write Steven Spielberg.
    • I can see it now: "Sorry, we can't get the data from your experiment because we're still downloading the IMAX camera data. That'll take another 5-7 years."
      • > I can see it now: "Sorry, we can't get the data from your experiment because we're still downloading the IMAX camera data. That'll take another 5-7 years."

        OK, we'll send a DVD-burner and a bunch of blanks in a the relay station that can manage high-bandwidth communications with the probe. ("Hey d00dz! I 4m 1337! My c4s3 m0d iz in m4rz 0rb1t!")

        The relay slurps the data and writes a track to the DVD, then detaches a small return vehicle that (after getting to a safe distance) flies home. For redundancy (and to piss off Jack Valenti), the blank is duplicated and stored somewhere on the main probe. (Worst-case scenario, a future probe docks with the main probe and flies back with a dozen DVD-ROMs.)

        Never underestimate the bandwidth of a DVD attached to a rocket, or somethin' like that. Mebbe we can get Netflix to sponsor the return vehicle ;-)

  • 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.

    • Of course it is needed, but trying to get people interested isn't that simple. Geeks everywhere were excited, but the jocks were still more amazed at the texture of a football than a robot on another planet. In the past, it was a race to beat the 'comies'.
      NASA would have to create some sort of reality program for the television networks to get the majority of the popluation interested.

  • Most science research these days makes me sad (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Dark Paladin ( 116525 ) <jhummel&johnhummel,net> on Friday September 27, 2002 @10:20AM (#4344304) Homepage
    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 [cnn.com].
    • without practical science, we'd still be wearing bushes for shorts

      You mean you aren't?!?

    • I agree 100% with everything you say (very well I might add!).

      Science progresses because somewhere out there, somebody has a burning desire to discover something "just because".
      Having just seen Shackleton at IMAX, I can only marvel at the sheer sense of adventure (some would argue stupidity) that the explorers showed. That sense of exploration should be directed at space, but unfortunately the corporate beurocrats and government have turned the "just because" into "has an immediate use".

      George Mallory said "Because it is there" when asked why he wanted to climb Mt Everest. Why should you need any other reason?
    • I disagree with much of your argument about doing research just for the sake of science. The discoveries and fruits of science should serve mankind in productive ways. Research funding should not be dolled out to anyone who wants to do research just because it's fun. Projects need to have very focused goals and time scales. How else are you going to discover accidents that DO help mankind? I agree that a massive undertaking to send humans to the moon has benefitted mankind in many ways through trial and error, but giving large sums of tax dollars to new Ph.D.s graduating from Bob's College of Chemistry and Physics isn't going to result in a greater influx of new accidental discoveries that will be helpful to mankind. There are plenty of accidental discoveries being made from the well focused and well funded current research projects. If you haven't gotten the gist of my argument, basically what I'm saying is that given a nice, grand, properly thought-out project, many accidental discoveries will flurish from it.

      There are already too many Ph.D.s in science and not enough positions for them. This is why it is so difficult for many to get a research and teaching position at universities. We don't need more scientists, there are too many already. What we need are more focused research projects that do benefit humans. Think of it as the public investing in science and later getting a return on the investment. Natural Selection in the Evolutionary sense is guiding science and our society(economics). Beneficial ideas and projects get funding, failures do not. And I don't want to forget to mention that Evolution doesn't give second chances; once you've had your chance to succeed or fail, that's it.

      A few comments about your examples:

      Regarding your comment of funding for super colliders, there should be only ONE supercollider. There is no need to have 5 or 6 spread through out the the nation. Build one massive supercollider that is multifunctional. This maximizes the efficiency of tax dollars and reduces redundancy of personnel and hardware.

      A brief comment about scientific journals:

      Another problem with current scientific literature is that only positive results are published, failures are not. This means that researchers working in closely related areas will learn through trial and error that certain chemical syntheses won't work. This further wastes public funding. If there existed scientific journals that published designated goals of a project and the failures associated with the project, a lot of material and time would not be wasted. But then again, this undermines the competitive nature of science not to mention that if your project is resulting in more failures than successes, perhaps it's time to choose another career.

      Insight into why we don't need more scientists:

      You should familiarize yourself with the Myers-Briggs Personality Test. It is a very simple test that categorizes personalities in to 16 different types. There are generally two personality types found in scientists: INTJ (Introvert, iNtuitive, Thinking, Judgemental) and ISTJ (Introvert, Sensing, Thinking, Judgemental). INTJ occurs in about 1% of the population. These people are really good at dealing with theories and abstract ideas. These people are your Einsteins, your Stephen Hawkings, and your synthetic organic chemists. ISTJ are good for doing repetitive technical tasks: routinely operating analytical equipment, being a watchmaker, etc... These people occur in about 5% of the population. So you see, graduating more scientists from universities is not going to improve the accidental discoveries in science. Truely successful scientists are born, not made. Their brains are, in a way, hardwired for that profession.

      Employment Stats for the scientific profession (assumes individuals working in their field of study or education):

      Chemists are the LEAST unemployed among scientific professionals. Biologists are the most unemployed and make up the largest percentage of educated scientists. Physicists are somewhere in between with regard to employment but make up the least percentage of scientists.
    • without practical science, we'd still be wearing bushes for shorts.

      Well, you now have bushes for Presidents. Not because they are easy, but because they are hard. No wait, that was Clinton...

  • New Unit of Project Cost Measure? (Score:5, Interesting)

    by Speare ( 84249 ) on Friday September 27, 2002 @10:21AM (#4344314) Homepage Journal

    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)?

    • It is intersting that they choose that as a unit of measure. People have stopped paying attention - when was the last time you stopped everything for a shuttle launch. Space exploration has stopped being sexy because it is routine. If they can do something that has some entertainment value in addition to the scientific value, then public interest is raised and it is easier to get funding. A return trip to the moon, as a precursor to going to mars might fit the bill.
      Yes, it is a sad commentary on the state of our society when we spend more money to watch JAckie Chan that performing basic research.

    • Will the Gulf War II cost more money than Rambo II or Superman II or Star Wars Episode 2?

      Ummm, yes.

      Wars are unbelievably expensive. They can easily blast through a massive movie budget in hours, maybe minutes. And thats even if you just look at the cost of putting the men, equipment and munitions in the field, completely ignoring the damage they leave behind.

  • IIRC, we lost comm after only 30-60 days, and the stated reason was that the batteries had failed.

    Said batteries were recharged each day by solar panels; thus each Martian day (approx. 25 hours long) represented one charge/discharge cycle.

    Now, the cheap NiCd batteries I can buy at Rat Shack are good for at least 500 charge/discharge cycles. You'd think the expensive units NASA buys would last even longer.

    I'm sure the conspiracy-minded could come up with a few explanations... : )
  • 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.
    • No one knows with certainty. There does appear to be very strong evidence that there was (or still is; althought this is probably not as likely) life on Mars. That's what science is about! Trying to put together the data to figure out something about the universe, the human body, social interactions, the cell, or whatever. No one KNOWS that there was (or is) life on Mars, but there are some interesting data (such as dried "riverbeds" and ice caps on the poles). This is just the reason that we need to keep going to Mars and keep exploring: we don't know.
    • You should consider the source of such statements as "these stories are simply fabricated to get more funding for deep space research" before putting them on par with peer-review articles or NASA statements.

      Anyway, there is certainly water on Mars (in the form of its polar ice caps). There is also extremely strong evidence that liquid water has flowed on its surface at some time in its past.

      What is not yet known is if water existed on the Martian surface for long periods of time, or if these flows were akin to lava flows on Earth: transitory upwellings of liquid from underground that last only a short time. With Mars's current thin atmosphere, any liquid water at its surface would quickly sublimate into the atmosphere. However, if its atmosphere used to be thicker...

      I've never heard a credible person characterize the probability for life on Mars as "very high". As the late Dr. Carl Sagan once said: "extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence".
  • ...it cost less than the making of even a medium-sized Hollywood movie...

    Did it cost less to fake the Mars landing than it cost to fake the moon landing?

    That was a joke, but it won't prevent this post being modded to oblivion...

  • 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 [warnerbros.com] 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 [cinephiles.net] in terms of believability, and not as much of a downer movie.
  • Remember how every single rock that was in the viewfinder for the probe was named? I remember thinking how dumb that was. But hey, spend enough money, and even stupid rocks on Mars will seem important.

    I wonder if NASA could offer to name Mars rocks after persons of the higher tax brackets in exchange for monetary remuneration.

    Two generations from now, when Mars trips are commonplace, and the space elevator is running full-time, some poor sap of a geek will give a tour of the first named rocks on Mars:

    "And here we have the Rock of Bill Gates. And here we have the Rock of Melinda Gates. And here we have the Rock of 'What's-his-bucket' Ballmer. And here is the Ross Perot Rock."

  • uh, not quite (Score:4, Interesting)

    by tunabomber ( 259585 ) on Friday September 27, 2002 @10:29AM (#4344376) Homepage
    Not mentioned, it cost less than the making of even a medium-sized Hollywood movie.

    That's strange- I read [solarviews.com] 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 (Score:5, Informative)

    by ajs ( 35943 ) <[ajs] [at] [ajs.com]> on Friday September 27, 2002 @10:31AM (#4344393) Homepage Journal
    I have a hard time talking about Mars or any other space-related topic now and not thinking about Celestia [shatters.net], 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!
    • You're my new hero, this program rocks! But they still have the mir space station set as a sattelite for Earth. :P Oh well, they should code into it the days leading up to it's ultimate demise so you can go back in time and watch it slowly disintegrate on reentry... hahaha! Oh yeah, and some of those textures for the planets are kind of uhhh, i don't know, low res, I'd like to be able to see a little more detail, but it's still a great program, thanks for the link.
      • But they still have the mir space station set as a sattelite for Earth.

        Look again. It's inside the earth. However, you can trun back time (use the j key to go backwards and the k and l keys to change rate of time passage) and watch Mir "un-crash" :)

        I tried to do this with Apollo 11 which they also have transit data for, but I went and forgot exactly when it flew. I'll look it up in the data files at some point, and then watch the mission...

        There are problems, by my gods! Have you tried selecting M33? Type "<return>M33<return>g" (make sure you turn on galaxy rendering with u and galaxy labeling with e). Now type "hc" to look back and the Milky Way. Finally, you can type "g" to take a put-star-trek-to-shame, high-speed journey back to Sol. It's just stunning!

  • Mars landing was faked (Score:4, Funny)

    by wackybrit ( 321117 ) on Friday September 27, 2002 @10:32AM (#4344395) Homepage Journal
    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.
  • Of course, the much more interesting part of Pathfinder is it's future...

    About 50 years from now, Val Kilmer should be dismantling it, attempting to build a makeshift radio, so he can brag to NASA about having seen Carrie-Anne Moss nude.
  • NExT has a strong track record for steering NASA to embrace several new initiatives. An in-space propulsion program is underway. A nuclear systems initiative is being pursued. Starting next year, a radiation program is scheduled to begin, said Lisa Guerra, Special Assistant to the Associate Administrator in the Office of Biological and Physical Research.

    That's some smooth shit. I feel so violated.

  • My "plan" to save NASA (or space exploring anyway) (Score:5, Insightful)

    by aengblom ( 123492 ) on Friday September 27, 2002 @10:38AM (#4344433) Homepage
    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) [msnbc.com]. 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 [slashdot.org] or Kodak [slashdot.org]
    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 ;-).

    • 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 [dyndns.org] video =).
      • 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.
        • 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 [eclipticenterprises.com].
  • I remember when JPL was showing a workstation in the control center displaying an image, the program displaying it read on the dragbar:

    XV - Unregistered Copy

    ...which should be familiar to a LOT of Unix users!

  • Damn five years... (Score:4, Insightful)

    by Ektanoor ( 9949 ) on Friday September 27, 2002 @10:49AM (#4344533) Journal
    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????

  • 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.

  • Funny. Whenever an interesting news story pops up on the top of Google News SciTech [google.com] 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?
  • NASA needs to come up with a method to deal with losing craft. My idea is this system:

    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.

    • NASA did this, except thet called it "better, faster, cheaper" instead of shit happens. Same idea, though.
    • Sending two of the same is a bad idea, because they typically fail because of some design flaw - which would hit both of them.

      Better to send one at the time. If the mission is successful, you can move on to some new question. If it is a failure, you can figure out what went wrong and fix it.

      /Tor
      • (* Sending two of the same is a bad idea, because they typically fail because of some design flaw - which would hit both of them. Better to send one at the time. *)

        But it seems that they completely redesign everything each time. The failed Polar Lander (AKA Polar Crater Glitter) didn't do anything signif different than the Viking probes, yet had a different design. Why did it have a flaw that wasn't in or didn't happen with the Vikings?

        If they wait 10 years between designs, then new technology will probably be available to use or try. 10 years is about the feedback time between one landing and the next design and building (except maybe minor changes). That may be too long to reuse an existing design.

        Mars just seems to be a tough place to land: thin atmosphere, wind gusts, slopes, and sharp rocks. Soviets had a bunch of land probe failures there also dispite a relatively high success rate on the moon and Venus.

        It just may go with the territory, literally.
  • Not mentioned, it cost less than the making of even a medium-sized Hollywood movie.
    Since NASA went with the 'more, but cheaper and less reliable' mission attitude, whenever considering costs of successful NASA missions, the costs of the duds must also be taken into account.
    That said, Pathfinder was a bargain at twice the price.
  • I would agree with what was previously said about the Mars mission being not as glamorous as the Moon missions. Except at the time of the Apollo mission I was about 4 years old and although I remember being glued to the TV set, I couldn't really understand what was going on. The Mars mission was more accessible, with details available over the net, with me no longer a kid. The experience was then enriched in so many ways that I was glad to have been old enough to witness the landing of something, somewhere outside the realms of earth. And most of all, experiencing it through the eyes of my 6 year kid (at the time). I can only wish to be a witness to a manned mission to Mars. But honestly I don't think I will witness it, but my kid... he's got all the time in the world. -Vuzz

  • One of my favorite net pranks (Score:4, Funny)

    by bobdotorg ( 598873 ) on Friday September 27, 2002 @11:16AM (#4344725)
    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."
  • What more probs, let point hubble at something, yea yea and this will get us huge amounts of PR.

    Lets face it Americans gave up the space race long ago, and its going to be too hard to start it back up (who gives up money from the pork to fund a renewd

    • Whoops my post got cut off.. ok anyway: Lets face it Americans gave up the space race long ago, and its going to be too hard to start it back up (who gives up money from the pork to fund a renewd drive to the stars) with the zeal it will take to keep up with China and India who both have much more inertia in their space programs than we do.

      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..

  • 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...)

  • The Mars Polar Lander Failure in STQE Magazine... (Score:4, Informative)

    by antdude ( 79039 ) on Friday September 27, 2002 @12:07PM (#4345090) Homepage Journal
    In Volume 4, Issue 5 (September/October 2002) issue of Software Testing & Quality Engineering Magazine [stqemagazine.com] (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. :)

  • 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'
  • 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.
  • .. untiltil we go and get the Pathfinder back so I can take a look at it in the Smithsonian.

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