Online NewsHour: Mars Update -- November 4, 1997

PATHFINDER PHONE HOME

November 4, 1997

NEWSHOUR TRANSCRIPT

Four months after the Pathfinder spacecraft landed on Mars, NASA has lost contact with the Mars rover, perhaps for good. After a background report by Spencer Michels, Elizabeth Farnsworth talks with Matt Golombek, the chief project scientist of the Pathfinder mission, about the latest development.

A RealAudio version of this segment is available.
NEWSHOUR LINKS:
July 14, 1997:
A panel examines the lure and the public's fascination with Mars.
July 11, 1997:
The first, pieced-together moving pictures have been received from the red planet.
July 9, 1997:
More information continues to come from the rover on Mars.
July 7, 1997:
Sojourner finds signs of ancient floods on the surface of Mars.
July 2, 1997:
A preview of Pathfinder's July 4th landing on Mars .
December 4, 1996:
The Pathfinder Mars probe takes off.
August 7, 1996
Kwame Holman reports on a Martian meteorite that has the scientific community buzzing.

Browse the NewsHour's coverage of space and science.
OUTSIDE LINKS
View Photos of Mars on NASA's Web site.
The Johnson Space Center

SPENCER MICHELS: Four months after the Pathfinder spacecraft landed on Mars, scientists at Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California, announced today they had lost contact with the small, twenty-three pound roving terrain explorer perhaps for good.
Contact Lost.

RICHARD COOK, Jet Propulsion Laboratory: I don't know that there's a definitive theory that we're operating on now but I guess our leading one is that on or about the 27th of September the battery on the Lander failed in some way. I guess it's a reluctant good-bye, but there is some low probability we might still be able to recover it, and so we don't want to give up on that quite yet.
SPENCER MICHELS: The unmanned mission started its journey to the red planet last December.
SPOKESMAN: Main engines start--1, zero, and lift-off--

SPENCER MICHELS: Pathfinder's trip was initially intended to be an engineering experiment to see if NASA could land on a planet's surface and send back images. With the expected cost around $260 million, just a fraction of the cost of previous missions to Mars, NASA officials viewed the project as the first in a series of low-cost trips to Mars. Seven months and three hundred nine million miles later Pathfinder arrived at the red planet for an Independence Day landing last summer. The spacecraft's 60-mile-an-hour plunge to Mars' surface was tricky but a success.
BRIAN MUIRHEAD, Project Manager: (July) I feel like we've won the Super Bowl, the World Series, and the World Cup all in three days.
Worth a thousand words...

SPENCER MICHELS: In the first few days Rover began transmitting images. They were pictures of a dry, dusty, desert-like landscape from a planet that scientists believe once had a hot iron core and was more like Earth than previously known. Through the information transmitted back to Earth researchers began studying the geological history of the planet and its rocks, including one named Barnacle Bill. The pictures also indicated there may have been rivers and floods on the planet at one time. Donna Shirley, manager of the Mars exploration program, discussed one of the discoveries with NewsHour correspondent Jeffrey Kaye.
DONNA SHIRLEY: And so now this is the most interesting spot anyone has ever seen close up on Mars.
JEFFREY KAYE: And that's because of what seems to be a momentous event in the life of Mars.
DONNA SHIRLEY: Yes, this huge flood, gigantic flood, just mind boggling. I mean, the canyon that this flood made is 30 miles wide and 3 miles deep. And it all happened in a very short period of time, and Matt Golombek compares it to draining the Great Lakes and in a week or something.
SPENCER MICHELS: Early on the mission captured the public's imagination. In the first month alone there were a record 566 million hits on the NASA Web side on the NASA Web site on the Internet. NASA and JPL engineers released what they said might be the last piece of data from the Pathfinder today, a photo of an area they called "Twin Peaks."
"The Rover is kind of on its own right now."

ELIZABETH FARNSWORTH: For more we're joined by Matt Golombek, the chief project scientist of the Pathfinder mission who's at Jet Propulsion Laboratories in Pasadena, California. Thank you for being with us.
MATT GOLOMBEK, Pathfinder Project Scientist: My pleasure.
ELIZABETH FARNSWORTH: Tell us where the Rover is right now and what it's doing.
MATT GOLOMBEK: Well, we don't actually know since we've lost communication with the Lander and all communication to the Rover goes through the Lander. The Rover is kind of on its own right now.
ELIZABETH FARNSWORTH: But is there speculation that it's actually up there going round and round, its mother ship?
MATT GOLOMBEK: It's possible. There is a contingency sequence that's loaded on board for a case we were to lose contact with it, but we could still watch it as it went about doing things. But we don't know, you know, how far it's gotten. It could be that it's reversed a small distance and it's errored out and it's waiting for a message from the Lander, which it, of course, won't get. So it could be just sitting still as well.
ELIZABETH FARNSWORTH: What do you think happened to it?
MATT GOLOMBEK: Well, the Lander was designed for a maximum of one month. And we hoped that we'd have an extended mission that would last longer but likely as the thermo cycling gets more cold, the temperature swings become larger as you enter into autumn, we think likely with the loss of the battery on board that the temperature cycling got extreme and something may have just broken, in fact.
ELIZABETH FARNSWORTH: I understand that it was designed to work for just--was it 30 days, right?
MATT GOLOMBEK: The Lander, itself, was designed for thirty days, and the Rover was designed for only seven days. So we've far exceeded our minimum requirements by a long shot.
ELIZABETH FARNSWORTH: But you could have designed it to last longer, right?
MATT GOLOMBEK: Sure, but that wasn't what the job was. The job was primarily an entry, descent, and landing demonstration. And then whatever we got after that was pretty much gravy.
Trying to contact the Rover.

ELIZABETH FARNSWORTH: Will you still be trying to communicate with it in the months that come?
MATT GOLOMBEK: Oh, absolutely. Through probably the rest of this fiscal year we'll have once every week or two, we'll try to communicate with it, trying the same series of things we've tried over the past month.
ELIZABETH FARNSWORTH: How do you do it? When you say series of things, what do you mean?
MATT GOLOMBEK: Well, we look at various possible scenarios that the Lander could have gone through and try to communicate with it at different times using either the low gain antenna or the high gain antenna, or even the auxiliary transponder.
ELIZABETH FARNSWORTH: What would you say the odds are now that you'll get some communication with it?
MATT GOLOMBEK: Oh, I say given that we haven't heard from it this long, it's unlikely we'll hear from it again.
Scientific advances.

ELIZABETH FARNSWORTH: What would you say now is the most important discovery that this mission made?
MATT GOLOMBEK: I think if you take--there's about six things that I find extraordinary about the scientific return from Pathfinder--if you try to put those altogether, it's a sort of a sound bite. I think we're seeing a planet, Mars, which is what more earth-like than we may have appreciated prior to going there with Pathfinder. We're seeing evidence that the early history of the planet may have been very warm and wet by potentially rounded boulders and cobbles at the scene and a potential rock known as a conglomerate, which may actually indicate liquid water in equilibrium with the environment. We see differentiated rocks, which are much more earthlike and less moonlike. All in all we're seeing Mars is looking more and more like the Earth and less and less like the very primitive planets like the Moon or Mercury.
ELIZABETH FARNSWORTH: I read that the dust is magnetic. What does that mean?
MATT GOLOMBEK: It means that there are highly magnetic minerals that are on the dust particles. These particles are very small. They're about a micron in size or so. And the current interpretation is that they have a cement which has been freeze-dried onto them that's known as maghemite, which is a magnetic mineral, and that's giving them their magnetic character. And the way you might produce that actually suggests an active hydro logic cycle on Mars, in which liquid water was coursing through the crust and picking up iron, leaching iron out of crustal materials, and precipitating that mineral onto these dust crates.
Life on Mars?

ELIZABETH FARNSWORTH: Did you come any closer to the big question of whether there was ever life on Mars?
MATT GOLOMBEK: As far as we ever hoped to get for the big question was learning about what the early environment was like, and as you know, we landed near the mouth of a giant catastrophic outflow channel to look at a whole variety of crustal materials and rocks. And it looks like we found a variety of them. And one of them, this conglomerate that I mentioned, is actually pointing towards a very warm and wet early period on Mars. If that's so, water is the absolute key requirement for life. And that would suggest that the environment on Mars early on in its history, at the same time life was getting started here on Earth, may have been very similar on Mars. And so, if anything, it's even a more compelling place to study now, to try to find out that overarching question.
ELIZABETH FARNSWORTH: We want to look at a picture now. It's one of the color pictures that came down. Tell us what you see and what you know now that you've had time to analyze it that we can't see just with our lack of information and knowledge.
MATT GOLOMBEK: Yes. This is a remarkable picture because it's taken by combining a whole series of images to actually get sub-pixel scale resolution, very, very high resolution in the far field. And what you see leading up to that crater rim, that little hill in the background, is a whole series of valleys and troughs, which are likely drainage channels from the catastrophic flood. You see rounded, sort of tabular rocks that look like they've been deposited by that flood, various doomlike features, and sitting perched on that rim is actually a very small crater called--which we informally called Rim Shot Crater, which has helped us locate the Lander with respect to surface features on Mars.
ELIZABETH FARNSWORTH: And there's a sort of differentiation of color there.
MATT GOLOMBEK: Yes. That's right. The rocks are darker and grayer, and the dust is sort of brighter and redder. And that's--the dust is this oxidized, rusted material, and the rocks are likely, you know, a more maffick material that's been sitting there.
ELIZABETH FARNSWORTH: Dr. Golombek, how many pictures did you bring back, or did it send back?
MATT GOLOMBEK: Well, we received about three gigabytes of information. That's billion bytes of information. There are about 16,000 images from the Lander and over 500 images from the Rover. And we'll be studying those for years and years to come.
ELIZABETH FARNSWORTH: How many measurements?
MATT GOLOMBEK: I mean, individual, it's hard to say. There are about 20 alpha proton x-ray. Those are the chemical composition measurements of rocks and soils. We made about eight and a half million measurements of pressure, temperature, and wind, and then of course all the pictures that I've mentioned.
ELIZABETH FARNSWORTH: Who will analyze all this data?
MATT GOLOMBEK: Well, the science community typically, the data, our job and the project now that we've gotten this wondrous data set is to put it into an archive that future generations and scientists of any time can come and look at the data and analyze it. And the idea is it's really this wondrous well of information that people can go and look at for years and years to come.
Mars on the Web.

ELIZABETH FARNSWORTH: You've actually made some of it available on the World Wide Web.
MATT GOLOMBEK: Oh, yes. Well, as you know, we made quite a bit of it available immediately. But the data that the scientists analyze are the raw data that's been calibrated very carefully. So you understand what the sources of uncertainty are not with it, and that's not something that's on the Web right now.
ELIZABETH FARNSWORTH: What next for you?
MATT GOLOMBEK: Well, I'm a research scientist, so I've just gotten the biggest bonanza I could ever hope for. I've got 3 billion bytes of data that go and sort through this, so I hope to be looking at that data for some time.
ELIZABETH FARNSWORTH: Well, thank you very much for being with us.

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