NASA’s Mars Pathfinder probe dropped to the surface of Mars for an airbag-cushioned landing 20 years ago Tuesday, bouncing 15 times across an ancient flood plain before deploying a mobile robot to usher in two decades of uninterrupted Martian exploration.
The Independence Day landing in 1997 was the first touchdown of a robot on Mars since NASA’s Viking landers arrived in 1976, and the U.S. space agency has since maintained a continuous robotic presence at the red planet, dispatching additional landers, rovers, and orbiters to sample rocks, monitor Martian weather, and glimpse into the world’s warmer, wetter past.
“I think Mars holds a special place in everyone’s hearts because it looks a lot like the Earth — it looks like a place we could live,” said Mike Watkins, director of NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, where engineers developed, built and operated Mars Pathfinder.
Watkins said Pathfinder’s landing on Mars helped lead NASA to answer fundamental questions about Earth’s neighbor: What was its history? How did Mars get the way it is? Was it once habitable?
Follow-on missions have sent rovers driving across a dried-up lake and river beds, to deposits left by ancient hot springs, and orbiters that found signs of intermittent water still present on the desert planet and helped unravel how Mars became so cold and inhospitable.
“I believe that Pathfinder, in particular, helped us understand a new way of exploring planets,” Watkins said in a panel discussion televised on NASA TV. “You could argue that Viking, as the first planetary lander, sort of pioneered in situ science, but that was kind of a one-off mission. I think Pathfinder showed us not only that mobility can be useful, but the notion of an ongoing interactive exploration of a planet, a voyage … of continuous discovery.” Read more...
The Independence Day landing in 1997 was the first touchdown of a robot on Mars since NASA’s Viking landers arrived in 1976, and the U.S. space agency has since maintained a continuous robotic presence at the red planet, dispatching additional landers, rovers, and orbiters to sample rocks, monitor Martian weather, and glimpse into the world’s warmer, wetter past.
“I think Mars holds a special place in everyone’s hearts because it looks a lot like the Earth — it looks like a place we could live,” said Mike Watkins, director of NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, where engineers developed, built and operated Mars Pathfinder.
Watkins said Pathfinder’s landing on Mars helped lead NASA to answer fundamental questions about Earth’s neighbor: What was its history? How did Mars get the way it is? Was it once habitable?
Follow-on missions have sent rovers driving across a dried-up lake and river beds, to deposits left by ancient hot springs, and orbiters that found signs of intermittent water still present on the desert planet and helped unravel how Mars became so cold and inhospitable.
“I believe that Pathfinder, in particular, helped us understand a new way of exploring planets,” Watkins said in a panel discussion televised on NASA TV. “You could argue that Viking, as the first planetary lander, sort of pioneered in situ science, but that was kind of a one-off mission. I think Pathfinder showed us not only that mobility can be useful, but the notion of an ongoing interactive exploration of a planet, a voyage … of continuous discovery.” Read more...