[X] My Assistant

[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!

[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.

[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