NASA marks 25 years since Pathfinder landed on Mars
This eight-image mosaic was acquired by Pathfinder July 5, 1997, the second Mars day, or sol, of the mission. The newly deployed Sojourner rover—the first of its kind on the Red Planet—sit on the surface of Mars after descending the Pathfinder path. Credit: NASA/JPL
When a daring team of engineers placed the first landers and rovers on the Red Planet a quarter of a century ago, they changed the way the world roamed.
One night in July 1997, Jennifer Trosper came home from work at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory holding an image of the Martian surface at her wheel. Earlier in the day, the agency’s Pathfinder mission had landed on Mars encased in a protective air bag and took pictures of the red landscape and debris that left him transfixed.
“When I was on the freeway, I had that picture on my steering wheel and kept looking at it,” Trosper recalls. “I probably should have taken a closer look at the road.”
NASA’s Sojourner Mars rover was seen on the 22nd Martian day, or sol, of the Pathfinder mission near a location nicknamed “The Dice” (three small rocks behind the rover) and a rock nicknamed “Yogi.” Credit: NASA/JPL
Given that Trosper was the mission’s flight director, his excitement was understandable. Pathfinder not only landed on Mars, a feat in itself, but also did so at a lower cost and time than previous Mars missions. And, the next day, the team would change the course of Mars exploration forever: They had sent instructions to Pathfinder to extend the ascent so that history’s first Mars rover, Sojourner, could glide to the planet’s surface.
NASA’s Mars Sojourner rover captured this image of the Pathfinder lander with airbags, now deflated, which are used to protect the spacecraft as it lands. The letters “JPL” and the American flag can be seen on the lander’s electronics box under the lander’s camera, which is mounted on the mast. Credit: NASA/JPL
Named after the fiery American abolitionist and women’s rights activist Sojourner Truth, the rover weighs just 25 pounds (11 kilograms) and is no bigger than a microwave oven. But after landing and spending 83 days traveling on the surface, the tiny spacecraft proved that exploring Mars with a rover is possible. It also saw Trosper work on a series of larger and more complex rovers: Spirit and Opportunity, Curiosity, and NASA’s most advanced Mars rover to date, Perseverance, where he served as project manager to date.
In fact, just as Pathfinder takes Sojourner on a journey, Perseverance takes Ingenuity, a brave little helicopter that’s proven to be powerful, controlled flight in Mars’ thin atmosphere is possible. Scheduled for just five flights, Ingenuity has flown 29 times so far, and has the potential to reshape Mars exploration as much as Sojourner did a quarter of a century ago.
With each new mission and each new way to explore Mars, humanity gains a better understanding of how the Red Planet once resembled Earth, was covered by rivers and lakes and featured the chemical elements needed to support life.
NASA’s search for life on the surface of Mars began in earnest in 1976, when the twin Viking landers arrived. The agency won’t land another spacecraft on Mars until Pathfinder, which comes in an era when NASA is geared to build its missions “faster, better, cheaper.” The Pathfinder team leveraged new approaches and technologies to deliver the mission ahead of schedule and at a lower cost than the Viking landers.
An inspiring future explorer
Jessica Samuels, an engineer intern in Arizona at the time of the Pathfinder landing, remembers watching news coverage of the event with her roommate. The excitement helped lead him to pursue aerospace engineering.
“That moment—seeing this little mechanical rover exploring the surface of another planet—made me realize it was something I wanted to do,” said Samuels, now Perseverance’s mission manager. “I’ve always been interested in outer space, but that’s the spark where I think this could actually become my profession.”
To take people on a journey, agencies are harnessing the power of another type of relatively new technology: the Internet. A website dedicated to the mission featured the latest images of Mars, and it became a sensation.
Doug Ellison, who today uploaded an order to Curiosity from JPL, will be entering college in the English countryside when Pathfinder lands. After hearing about the Pathfinder website, he cycled into town into an IT business that allowed people to pay by the hour for Internet access.
With business employees huddled in tow, Ellison saved the Mars Pathfinder landscape to a 3 1/2-inch floppy disk (this was long before cloud computing) and printed it on a black-and-white dot matrix printer to create a view of the Red Planet that he could view from home.
He glued the prints to form a circle. Then, he stuck his head into it.
NASA’s Mars Sojourner rover captured this panorama of the Red Planet about a week before its last data transmission, which occurred on September 27, 1997. Credit: NASA/JPL
“It was the worst VR experience ever,” said Ellison.
Even so, the Internet provides an inspiring new way to experience space exploration.
“Putting so much online so quickly is a paradigm shift. That’s the motivation today to share as much as we can as fast as we can from our rover mission,” said Ellison. “I think the Mars program is indebted to Pathfinder for being the springboard for everything since.”
Leading technology demo
Sojourner started out as a technology demonstration, NASA’s way of testing and proving what’s possible. Intelligence started the same way—though now it’s a demonstration operation looking for locations on Mars not just for Perseverance, but also for possible landing sites for future Mars Sample Return campaigns.
The campaign will bring samples collected by Perseverance to Earth for study by powerful laboratory equipment looking for signs of ancient microscopic life. But the campaign will include other milestones, such as the first instance of a rocket launching from the surface of another planet (a key part of getting samples from Mars to Earth). The feat will also support future efforts to land humans on Mars and bring them back home.
Back in 1997, Trosper and his team were busy learning to pilot a rover on Mars for the first time. “We’re a bit of a cowboy. We just don’t know what we don’t know,” he said.
What they do know is this: Their mission lives up to its name, finding a way forward to what seemed almost impossible before.
NASA will launch 2 more helicopters to Mars to help restore rock
Provided by Jet Propulsion Laboratory
Quote: NASA marks 25 years since Pathfinder landed on Mars (2022, 27 July) retrieved 29 July 2022 from https://phys.org/news/2022-07-nasa-years-pathfinder-mars.html
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