Mars Pathfinder Ten Year Anniversary, July 4, 2007., - The little rover that started it all... Options

[Guest_Oersted_*]

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!

[djellison]

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

[gpurcell]

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

[CosmicRocker]

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.

[Stu]

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...

[brellis]

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

llLIterally?!?

[AndyG]

Some versions of the website seem to have been preserved.

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

[ElkGroveDan]

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?

[SFJCody]

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.

[DEChengst]

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

[dvandorn]

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...

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

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

[tedstryk]

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.

[djellison]

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

I WANT THAT ON DVD.

Brilliant brilliant footage - amazing stuff.

Doug

[rogelio]

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

[ElkGroveDan]

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

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

Attached thumbnail(s)