The Mars Pathfinder, the plucky little space probe that captured America’s imagination, is silent and presumed pretty much dead, NASA officially announced Tuesday.
Scientists gathered Tuesday at the probe’s mission control in California not to bury Pathfinder but to praise the probe for how it changed the way our solar system is being explored.
A dead battery ended the mission for the $196 million Pathfinder, which was designed to last only a month. Pathfinder sent back data for three months.
“What a dazzling amount of information we’ve gotten back. In every way this ought to be considered a stunning success,” said American University astronomer Richard Berendzen. “I think it’s properly viewed in a historical perspective as the first step in a whole array of robotic missions. It’s one small step for a robot–and now just watch.”
Pathfinder project manager Brian Muirhead said, “It really has set the tone for the future of space exploration.”
Future missions to Mars, comets and other celestial bodies are following the low-cost, small-scale, high-risk method that Pathfinder pioneered, Muirhead said.
Rovers that will motor around on Mars in 1999 and 2001 are direct descendants of the table-top-size, six-wheeled Sojourner rover that Pathfinder released on Mars.
“It was absolutely essential for what’s coming next,” said Cornell University astronomer Steve Squyres, who has helped NASA plan future Martian missions. “The rover missions that follow will literally follow in Pathfinder’s tracks.”
Pathfinder, which bounced onto Mars on July 4 cushioned by massive airbags, was primarily a technology mission to see if the low-cost concept worked.
Still, it produced scientific data that made scientists downright giggly.
“We returned more information about Mars than anyone could have hoped or prayed for,” chief scientist Matt Golombek said from the Jet Propulsion Lab in Pasadena, Calif.
Sojourner trekked 330 feet to study the composition of 10 Martian rocks. Pathfinder beamed back to Earth more than 16,500 images of Mars.
“It’s pretty much rewritten the book in what we thought we knew about Mars,” University of Central Florida astronomer Nadine Barlow said. “It’s opened up a whole new world essentially in terms of how Mars may have been similar to Earth in the past.”
Scientists were surprised to find that some Martian rocks were Earthlike. They also found signs that water used to flow on the planet’s surface, making Mars more conducive to the formation of life, Golombek said.
The public watched all of this as it happened, with more than 700 million hits on the Pathfinder Web sites. It was NASA’s most popular robotic mission “in part because it was so daring and in part because it was the little robot and we projected ourselves into that,” Berendzen said.
