Sorry, I'm one day late, but nevertheless: yesterday, on July 4th it was 10 years ago that the little rover bumped down to a landing on Mars.

I'll never forget watching the press conference late at night in Denmark, staying up late despite a very disgruntled young lady-friend of mine (still had my priorities right at the time!).

Some fantastic images were sent down and the little rover did really well. It's 4 months of activity certainly influenced my thinking on the possible longevity of the MER's, and thereby set me up for the incredibly surprise of their several years of operations.

It also became a major major phenomenon on the fledgling internet, probably to the surprise of many who didn't think a science web site could become so popular. The original Patfinder web page is a great testament to the mission (and web design of the period)!

Congrats on the anniversary to MarsEngineer and all the other members of the original Pathfinder team!

I was about to go "4 months...well...it was only 3 really!" then remembered the fact that it looks like Sojourner did a little road trip of her own after we said goodbye

Doug

I went to Tidbinbilla (outside Canberra) to watch the pictures come in (they'd set up a big screen in the visitor's center).

I meant to post a comment too, but I am also late. I really liked the vrml stuff they did. In the early renditions I was able to download all the necessary files via dialup, and then run the virtual reality environment off line. Later, I had to download everything over dialup every time I wanted to enter that environment.

Some versions of the website seem to have been preserved.

I wasn't even online when Sojourner was trundling around Yogi... I had to rely on one of my "hi tech" friends from my astronomical society (I ran the Cockermouth AS in those days) downloading new pics for me each day and putting a dozen printed out pages through my letterbox for me to drool over when I got back from work. Happy memories tho, very happy memories...

llLIterally?!?

Ah...brewed up with "Adobe PageMill 2.0 Mac". Them were t'days. CSS? Who needs it? Doctype definitions? Why bother??

Though more disturbing than the ten-year old site, is my younger-than-pathfinder nine-year-old son, asking pertinent questions about EDL for Phoenix and MSL. (His opinion on success, seeing the animations: "possibly" and "no way".)

Andy

That was the first time I watched a live video stream (from home!). It was the EDL coverage from JPL. Just a bunch of people hunched around monitors but I thought it was cool to be getting the news live.

As I recall that computer was a 75 mhz Pentium on dial-up that had been provided for my wife while she was on maternity leave 6 months earlier, and no one asked for it back. 200 Megs of disk space and the modem was built-in! It had Netscape, MS Word, Adobe Pagemaker, Photoshop 4.0 and Windows 95! What more could a person want?

I remember that summer... lots of updates from Galileo, the NEAR Mathilde encounter, and to top it all off, three months of news from the surface of another planet courtesy of Mars Pathfinder!

I wonder why the MERs have proved so much more resilient than MPF.

A 35 minutes documentary called "The Pathfinders" on YouTube:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QJ3EP6W6W9Y
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K98e6v3Ort0
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PPRz2zGHa5M
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Mr2cCy7tkek

I was online when MPF landed -- that is to say, I had a *very* old PC (10/25 MHz switchable 488 processor, 100 MB hard drive, which was already 7 years old by then) that was barely able to run AOL 2.5. I downloaded each new image and drooled over them; for the first time in 20 years, I was looking at new images from Mars!

I was also having my very first dating relationship with a woman whom I met on the internet. I had been married and dated quite a bit before that, but this was new, meeting people on the internet. Since then, I've mostly dated women I've met online, but then it was something quite new. And that was the year the company for which I was consulting sent me on trips to England, Holland, Belgium, Argentina, Japan, the Philippines and Singapore. So the spring and summer of 1997 have a lot of good memories for me...


Better battery technology. The MERs were given batteries rated for something like 4,000 charge/discharge cycles under Martian thermal conditions, while MPF had batteries rated for something like 40 charge/discharge cycles.

-the other Doug

I reprocessed the sojourner color shots. http://www.strykfoto.org/acrawlonmars.html
I have elaborate plans to finish the shots from the other rover cameras, as well as a version of the super-pan with gap-fill. I had hoped to get it done for the 10th anniversary...I will be luck to have it done by the 20th

The thing I remember is patiently waiting for the images to download. I graduated from High School that year, and entered college while the mission was still active. My connection was a 14.4 modem, so the images seemed giant.

I WANT THAT ON DVD.

Brilliant brilliant footage - amazing stuff.

Doug

Any idea when we might get HiRise pictures of Pathfinder and Sojourner?

http://hirise.lpl.arizona.edu/PSP_001890_1995

I do a little comparative thing with Keynote ( Powerpoint for Macs ) and it highlights features in the surface imagery and HiRISE imagery, and most seem to be fairly convinced by it

Doug

Remember that PATHFINDER was literally that.. an engineering technical demonstration mission, proving we could go back to the surface of Mars with a useful payload for something like 1/20 the cost of the Vikings. When it was initiated, it was a proof-of-concept for a network of meteorology/geophysical stations the then didn't (Clinton cut NASA's budget the first 7 years of his presidency, after inflation, at least) ever get funded.

Science capability on Pathfinder was minimal. The rover was a demonstration-of-concept-in-miniature enginering test, too, again with rudimentary science (1 add-on German instrument). We wouldn't have MER's rolling if it weren't for Pathfinder and Sojourner.

I *WISH* Pathfinder had lasted long enough for Sojourner to drive to the northern local horizon and look over it at North Hill, but it didn't. Would have been home-made cranberry sauce to go with the gravy and turkey-stuffing and everything else!

Great documentary at the youtube-link! - So many fresh young faces

It really was a trailblazing mission: we should set up a production line of airbagged rovers for solar system exploration, but Pathfinder will always be the first!

Since I am a Dane, I just need to add that there was a highly successful Danish magnet experiment on board.

"Indeed, and the color-chart, and the rover's dust accumulation experiment...
But the only *real* instruments were the PanCam camera, the meteorology, and the APXS on the rover.

On an engineering test mission, all science capabilities are secondary in priority to proving it works and that future flights of the technology can support REAL science.

Surveyor 1 had no science instruments.
Find the NASA SP publication "Surveyor 1, Preliminary Science Results", or much better, JPL-TR-32-1023 "Surveyor 1 Mission Report, Volume 2: Science Results" (my copy was stolen, long ago.. grrrrrr), online or at an engineering library, and see what you can do without science instruments!

Magnet experiments go back to Surveyor and the Vikings... Great science for very little engineering complexity.. and no instrument telemetry required!

Doug,
I talked to John Beck, he said the video is available from the JPL video library:

Link: http://www.jpl.nasa.gov/videos/vidcat.cfm

AVC-1998-102-1/1 The Pathfinders - full length version
--- see pathfinders AVC-1998-202 -----
Audience: Gen. Edu. Resource
Client: Brian Muirhead
Master: BCAMsp
Audio 1: Mono mix 2: Mono mix
10/22/1998 - 0:36:00 Producer: John Beck

He didn't know how much the videos cost.

LOL I'll include it in the next batch Doug

Might be better still to rescout the library for source material that made it Some of those various drop tests, chute tests, DRL tests etc - fascinating stuff.

Doug

Hard to believe its been 10 years...but it's also hard to believe how much more we know about Mars today then only 10 years ago.

Pathfinder was when Mars for me became a real place, with Twin Peaks beckoning off in the distance....

Yes, Twin Peaks were just as impossibly far away as Columbia Hills...

Found an apparently news paper called "Comprehensive mapping of spectral classes in the imager for Mars Pathfinder Super Pan"
here: http://www.themarsjournal.org/contents/2008/0004/

Oh i love that little guy. So inspiring,

Actually he was the reason for me to dig deeper into the Unmanned Spaceflight.
And there`s still that National Geographic Anaglyph Panorama of Pathfinder on my Livingroom Wall

just to mention it


Dirk,

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Hey, watch that "little guy" stuff. He's very sensitive.
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It's called heterosis effect: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heterosis

9's wayyyyy too much, heterosis won't work! As you can see MSL will be much more than 300 lbs.

MSL: "Targeting ChemCam laser..."

I have redone a super-pan section around the north knob. Some of the images were plagued with transmission dropouts, which made processing interesting.

Hello,

I hope I'm not going to get any trouble here, but I took the liberty to create 2 wallpapers from the MPF Presidential panorama, for my laptop (1280x800, yes it's indeed a MacBook), and I though other people may want to use them as well, so here is the first one attached to this post:

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... and the second one:

Click to view attachment

Cheers,

beautiful!

This might be a silly question but if Pathfinder had a Rover Like Spirit and Opportunity.
What direction would they have sent it exploring???

I think Twin Peaks would have been an interesting Target

Big Crater, then Twin Peaks, almost certainly. Spirit 2.0

Doug

I always found it frustrating that the North Knob lay just over the edge from Pathfinder's view but sadly Sojounrner didn't last long enough to drive over the edge and image it in its full glory. That's why rovers are so useful - they really appeal to the human urge to explore and see what's just around the next corner.

I have done a new Twin Peaks pan. It is displayed at Phoenix resolution, but it looks better at about 50% of that. It is not an accident that the area around the peaks looks sharper. It is up to 50 frames deep in places, while some of the outlying areas benefit from as few as six frames.


Click to view attachment

I was up in the cafeteria at JPL watching the new images come over the wire, with the rest of the Friends and Families. That was back in the day when you could just drive up, sign-in, and take a tour of the place. The landing party was by invitation only.

The Mission / Lander was MPF, the rover was Sojourner. The lander was also named Sagan Memorial Station.

When we first landed, images and data were coming through so clearly we upped the baud rate to a previously untested setting. It caused a race condition to be exhibited, precipitating reboots.

It took the team about a week of hard and furious work to pinpoint the race condition exhibited on Mars, craft a fix, and test it.

Pathfinder was a remarkable departure from SOP for NASA - it marked the shift from creating each new space probe's computers and software from scratch, to purchasing commercial off-the-shelf components and software, enabling the scientists and engineers to concentrate on their applications and spacecraft, and enabling software and design re-use.

The MER twins inherited a lot of their design and software architecture from MPF. That makes MPF their Grandfather.

Beautiful!

Thanks. Here is an alternate version (a bit less blue).

Here is one more alternate version. It is manipulated in an attempt to compensate for the fact that the images in the base data were chosen to create the highest resolution image possible, not for proper filter representation. That makes for an odd effect when combined with color data.