Mars Trip Is Declared a Success

Wrapping up Pathfinder’s primary 30-day mission, NASA scientists Friday declared the space agency’s return to the Red Planet after 20 years a “100 % success.”

Calling the six-wheeled Sojourner “the most excellent rover imaginable,” project scientist Matthew Golombek said the performance of both rover and lander “gives us tremendous confidence” about the ability to explore Mars cheaply and efficiently with small rovers.

Pathfinder’s success “proves that future rovers don’t have to be pickup trucks to do good science,” Mars program manager Donna Shirley said after a news briefing at Pasadena’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory.

Over the past 30 days, Pathfinder has taken nearly 10,000 images of the Red Planet, covered more than 50 yards of territory--including a circumnavigation of the lander--and sent back millions of weather readings.

“I think we finally have a feeling of what it could be like to stand [on Mars]. We know what our footprints would look like,” Golombek said. Astronauts on Mars would kick up dust, he said, and feel wild swings in temperature.

With more than 566 million hits on the World Wide Web, the mission also became “the largest Internet event in the history of the world,” said Golombek.

In all, scientists received more than twice as much data as they had expected during this time.

Pathfinder will continue to take pictures over the next several months, completing a 12-color stereo “super pan” of the landscape.

But the 30-day milestone means that the mission will be fundamentally shifting gears. It will focus on long-term monitoring of surface and atmospheric changes as Mars slips into winter. The main goal now, Golombek said, “is to stay alive as long as possible.”

Meanwhile, the weather station on Mars saw the first clear signs of a swirling “dust devil,” perhaps as much as half a mile high. Sensors recorded a sudden gust of wind that quickly died, followed by another gust blowing in the opposite direction. The pattern was accompanied by a steep dip in pressure--an “almost conclusive” signature of a dust devil, said science team leader Timothy Schofield.

The Sojourner continued to trundle about the floury pink surface taking soil samples and chemical analyses of rocks. Preliminary results from a bright white rock named Scoobie Doo suggest that it is chemically closer to soil than rock, although it is so hard that Sojourner could not scratch it with its spiked wheels.

Currently, Sojourner is heading toward Rock Garden, where it is scheduled to analyze a series of rocks of special interest to scientists because of their steep, dust-free faces. Then it will retrace its steps, this time circling the lander counterclockwise. When it returns to Pathfinder, it will analyze magnetic dust collected over the past month on a ramp sensor.

After that, Golombek said, “clearly, it’s head for the hills.” Specifically, scientists would like to check out a 100-foot-high rise less than half a mile to the north, perhaps getting a peek at the landscape on the other side. However, that could take months, Golombek said.

Golombek did say that there is some room for improvement in future rovers: “It would be nice if you had a mechanism to clean the dust off the rocks.”