The campaign would bring samples collected by Perseverance to Earth to be studied by powerful lab equipment searching for signs of ancient microscopic life. Ingenuity began the same way – though now it’s an operations demonstration scouting locations on Mars not just for Perseverance, but for a possible landing spot for a future Mars Sample Return campaign. Sojourner began as a technology demonstration, NASA’s way of testing and proving what is possible. “I think the Mars program owes Pathfinder a debt of gratitude for being the entire stepping stone for everything since.” That’s the motivation today to share as much as we can as quickly as we can from our rover missions,” said Ellison. “Putting so much online so quickly was a paradigm shift. “It was pretty much the worst VR experience ever,” Ellison said.Įven so, the Internet provided an inspiring new way to experience space exploration. He taped the print-outs up to form a circle. With the business’ employees huddled behind him, Ellison saved Pathfinder’s Martian landscapes onto a 3 1/2-inch floppy disk (this was an era long before cloud computing) and printed them out on a black-and-white dot matrix printer to create a vista of the Red Planet he could look at from home. After hearing about Pathfinder’s website, he bicycled into town to an IT business that let people pay by the hour for Internet access. A website devoted to the mission featured the latest images from Mars, and it became a sensation.ĭoug Ellison, who today uploads commands to Curiosity from JPL, was about to enter college in rural England when Pathfinder touched down. To take the public along for the journey, the agency harnessed the power of another kind of relatively new technology: the Internet. “I had always been interested in space, but that was the spark where I thought this could actually be my profession.” “That moment – seeing this little mechanical rover exploring the surface of another planet – made me realize that’s something I would love to do,” said Samuels, now Perseverance’s mission manager. ![]() ![]() ![]() The excitement helped lead her to pursue aerospace engineering. Jessica Samuels, an engineering intern in Arizona at the time of Pathfinder’s landing, remembers watching news coverage of the event with her roommate. The agency wouldn’t land another spacecraft on Mars until Pathfinder, which arose in an era when NASA had been directed to build its missions “faster, better, cheaper.” Pathfinder’s team harnessed new approaches and technologies to deliver the mission ahead of schedule and at a lower cost than the Viking landers. NASA’s search for life on the Martian surface started in earnest in 1976, when the twin Viking landers arrived. With every new mission and every new way of exploring Mars, humanity gains a better understanding of how the Red Planet once resembled Earth, covered by rivers and lakes and featuring the chemistry needed to support life.
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