SIGNS OF ANCIENT FLOODS JULY 7, 1997 TRANSCRIPT

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The Sojourner Rover continues to study the surface of Mars, and has sent back what may be evidence that some of the Red Planet was covered with flood waters billions of years ago.

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A RealAudio version of this NewsHour segment is available. NewsHour Links An Online Forum on the possibilities of life on other planets. July 2, 1997: A preview of Pathfinder's July 4th landing on Mars . March 10, 1997: Report on the Galileo probe and the moons of Jupiter. 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. July 10, 1996 Jeffrey Kaye looks at the moons of Jupiter May 28, 1997: The space shuttle Atlantis lands after a rendezvous with the Mir. February 18, 1997: NewsHour historians discuss the successes and future of the space program September 26, 1996: Astronaut Shannon Lucid returns to Earth after 188 days on the Mir. Browse the NewsHour's coverage of space and science.

JIM LEHRER: We go to Mars and to Jeffrey Kaye of KCET/Los Angeles reports.

JEFFREY KAYE: A geological expedition by a six-wheel robotic rover is well underway on the surface of Mars. Today scientists at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, JPL in Pasadena, released more pictures of the rocky terrain, where the Pathfinder spacecraft landed on July 4th. Pictures and data indicate the surface is rusting, a phenomenon scientists say they don't quite understand. This morning, Flight System Manager Brian Muirhead summarized the heady events of the last three days.

BRIAN MUIRHEAD: I feel like we've won the Superbowl, the World Series, and the World Cup all in three days.

SPOKESMAN: The spacecraft is currently 1400 kilometers from the surface of Mars.

JEFFREY KAYE: The current research phase of the mission caps a suspenseful and emotional holiday weekend that had everyone--engineers and the world's news media -- asking: Will the spacecraft be able to carry out its mission? At ten in the morning, July 4th, engineers in JPL's control room nervously awaited word that the Pathfinder spacecraft had done what it had been programmed to do: Parachute down, inflate air bags, bounce on the surface, open up, and send word it had arrived. At its scheduled landing time, engineers celebrated and waited for a transmission from the spacecraft.

ROB MANNING: Seeing a signal from the surface of Mars is actually the hard part.

JEFFREY KAYE: Within minutes, a signal arrived.

SPOKESMAN: We're there. You've got a big strong signal. (cheers)

JEFFREY KAYE: The first signal showed that the spacecraft had landed. And hours later, more cheers as a stronger signal sent a stream of data, indicating Pathfinder's systems were functioning, then--a signal from Washington.

GOLDIN: Hello Mr. Vice President.

VICE PRESIDENT GORE: Congratulations to all of you out there on behalf of President Clinton.

JEFFREY KAYE: Scientists who examined the data determined the spacecraft landed within miles of the intended target.

ROB MANNING: The little engine that could did.

JEFFREY KAYE: Flight engineer Rob Manning said the lander bounced at least 15 times, then opened up on its base after the air bags deflated. Chief scientist Matthew Golombek cautioned reporters not to expect too much of the first images.

MATTHEW GOLOMBEK: These are pretty nasty looking pictures.

JEFFREY KAYE: But when the first pictures did come down, they were anything but nasty. Detailed images showed a rocky desert landscape and closeups of the rover.

ROB MANNING: That's a rover wheel.

JEFFREY KAYE: Scientists studied the images and said they were salivating to send the rover out to analyze the geology. But the first pictures also showed a problem.

SMITH: Look at that air bag bunched up on the right side of the rover petal.

JEFFREY KAYE: The air bag interfered with the planned deployment of the rover. But flight system manager Brian Muirhead was confident.

BRIAN MUIRHEAD: There's a lot of things that we can do to fix things. It's amazing what can do from 120 million miles away.

JEFFREY KAYE: Muirhead said engineers would send a series of computer commands to direct the lander to lift a petal and retract an air bag. A later picture showed the maneuver corrected that problem, but flight director Guy Bruthalsheath announced there was a new problem.

GUY BRUTHALSHEATH: We have an issue with rover to lander communications.

JEFFREY KAYE: Translation: the rover could not send data or pictures back to the lander, where they would be relayed to earth. Engineers tried a fix familiar to every computer owner. They turned the machines off and on.

SPOKESMAN: We have rover data! (cheers)

JEFFREY KAYE: With the problem fixed on Saturday afternoon, exultant scientists and engineers prepared to send the rover on its way.

WALLACE: As I said a little earlier, we feel like somebody just invited us back to the party.

JEFFREY KAYE: As the party continued, engineers experimented on a mockup of the lander and rover--then sent commands to unfurl a ramp for the rover to wheel down.

SPOKESMAN: We can report visually six wheels on soil.

JEFFREY KAYE: Computer wizards assembled an eight frame movie of the rover's descent. Other JPL scientists proudly unveiled a 14-foot panoramic mosaic--a 360 degree picture of Ares Vallis, the area surrounding The lander.

REPORTER: If this is all you every got, what would you be able to say about Mars?

SMITH: It's a lot like Tucson.

JEFFREY KAYE: The area does resemble a desert in the Southwest United States. It's a rocky, dusty plain. The rocks appear to show evidence of ancient floods believed to have occurred eons ago. On Sunday, Pathfinder geologists said they were delighted by the variety of rocks.

GOLOMBEK: We really do have a grab bag suite of rocks here.

JEFFREY KAYE: Geologists picked a rock, which they named "Barnacle Bill," that's about six feet away from the lander for the rover's first tests. A spectrometer has measured its chemical composition, and a camera has taken close-up pictures. The 23 pound rover--about the size of a file cabinet drawer-- will wheel on to other targets to follow a series of commands worked out using 3-D pictures. In the meantime, the lander is sending back weather reports.

Temperatures reached minus 8 Degrees Fahrenheit yesterday. The low was minus 127 degrees. There have been mild winds with gusts from the Southwest up to 10 miles an hour. As scientists analyze the data, computer users are also getting in on the act. Internet sites set up for the mission have received more than a hundred million visits. Overseeing all of this is Donna Shirley, manager of the Mars exploration program--whom I spoke to earlier today.

JEFFREY KAYE: Thank you for joining us.

DONNA SHIRLEY: You're welcome.

JEFFREY KAYE: Is there anything that you know now that you didn't know before?

DONNA SHIRLEY, Manager, Mars Exploration Program: Well, we know that we can land on Mars for $265 million and rove. We didn't know that four years ago when we started out. And we know that air bags work, and we know that this crazy technique that everyone thought was so risky worked perfectly. And we know that small overs can roll onto the surface of Mars and not think that of sites.

So it's equivalent of one the small step for man that Neil Armstrong took; well, this is one small step for humankind that this rover has taken, and that the air bags and the parachute--well, we've used the parachutes before on Viking. So that engineering techniques of both landing and roving on Mars are new things in the universe.

The scientists are just starting to--very tiny scratch the surface of Mars, but the diversity of the site is what the scientists have been mostly exclaiming over, you know, how many different kinds of rocks. And it's such a contrast to the Viking site. Now, that wasn't unexpected. I mean, Matt Golombek was behind picking this site, and he picked it because it was a grab-bag site, so it's not surprising that this happened, but it's astonishing the variety and the number of things.

JEFFREY KAYE: And you didn't expect this variety.

DONNA SHIRLEY: Well, we expected a variety, but we just didn't know--I mean, we've never been there before. It's a new world, a new place on a world that has the same surface area, the same dry land surface area as the Earth. And we only landed in two very dull places before with the Vikings, 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, right?

DONNA SHIRLEY: Yes. A huge flood, gigantic flood, just mind boggling. I mean, the canyon that this flood made is thirty miles wide and three miles deep, and it all happened in a very short period of time, and Matt Golombek compares it to draining the Great Lakes in a week or something.

JEFFREY KAYE: The experiments that the rover is conducting, will they add any more to our knowledge or help answer the question about the mystery of whatever happened, or was there life on Mars?

DONNA SHIRLEY: Well, the rover will probably--will definitely not answer that question. It's very unlikely that the rover will see a fossil, for instance. The fossils in the Martian meteorite, for example, are far, far too small to be--if they are fossils--are far, far too small to be seen by instruments that the rover could carry; however, the rover is going to tell us what Mars is made of, so just by the fact that the rover got the spectrometer on a rock on Mars is a really historic moment because we will know the composition of that rock.

Viking was looking for life, couldn't find any because they had the wrong paradigm. They assumed, if it was there, it would be--you could pick it up off the surface--and we know that that's not true. So if life is there, it's in the rocks or it's underground, and we're starting to do the very first, tiny exploration of the rock.

JEFFREY KAYE: We have seen the sensational pictures of the different rocks.

DONNA SHIRLEY: Yes.

JEFFREY KAYE: That apparently have their own personality. Scientists are giving them names.

DONNA SHIRLEY: Yes, scientists do that. Well, they have to be able to talk about them, and they could call them, you know, 47003, or something, but as soon as you say Casper of Flat Top or Barnacle Bill, you know exactly which one they're talking about, so it's a very handy technique just for communicating.

JEFFREY KAYE: But in terms of sending the rover out to tell it which rock to look at, most of us, a rock is a rock. What difference does it make? Obviously, it does to a scientist. How do they determine that they should look at Rock X instead of Rock Y?

DONNA SHIRLEY: Well, Barnacle Bill was a target of opportunity because Barnacle Bill was right next to the ramp, and all the rover had to do was turn and back up. So that was easy. That was a give me. And also Barnacle Bill has part of it that's dusty. Part of it looks very clean, and they want clean rock because that's where you get to the real rock, rather than the patina of dust. The spectrometer, if there's dust, it'll measure the dust more than the rock, so they wanted a nice clean one.

And the rover successfully backed right on to the clean part of Barnacle Bill. Now, the next rock is Yogi, I believe, the big black rock, and they're interested in that because it's fairly close. It's very large, and the spectrometer will be able to be gotten on it fairly easily. And it's a different color and a different shape and a different texture than Barnacle Bill.

JEFFREY KAYE: So they're looking for variety.

DONNA SHIRLEY: Yes, they are. They want to understand all the variety they can get at.

JEFFREY KAYE: How long is this going to go on? How long will Sojourner rove?

DONNA SHIRLEY: Well, Sojourner has the--the lander--let me put it that way--has fulfilled all of its mission success criteria. It landed on Mars successfully for a very low cost, compared to other missions, and it--the camera has taken images. The weather station is working perfectly. The rover still has one more job to do. The rover's job is rock, soil, lander.

That means get the spectrometer on a rock, do some soil mechanics experiments in one soil area, and take a picture of the lander. Well, last night we got the spectrometer on the rock and took a picture of the lander showing the air bags all bunched up and the high gain antenna, so two out of three. Tonight they'll do the soil mechanics experiment, and then all the rover objectives will be fulfilled, and they'll be able to--everything else is gravy.

Now this will go on indefinitely until something fails because both the rover and the lander are solar powered. There's nothing to run out. The lander batteries will get tired after a while and not be able to be recharged, and probably winter, at the onset of winter, which is several months away, will freeze the rover and the lander to death.

JEFFREY KAYE: So the rover could keep going for at least several months.

DONNA SHIRLEY: Yes, it could. There's no reason it can't.

JEFFREY KAYE: In talking to the scientists and the engineers in the past few days the best word I can think of to describe them is gleeful, jubilant.

DONNA SHIRLEY: Euphoric.

JEFFREY KAYE: Euphoric?

DONNA SHIRLEY: Yes. Euphoric I think is a good word. Ecstatic. I mean, it's like Christmas and the 4th of July and ice cream and fireworks all rolled into one. It's just unimaginable how good we all feel about it.

JEFFREY KAYE: Mission accomplished?

DONNA SHIRLEY: Yes. Mission accomplished, for sure.

JEFFREY KAYE: Thank you for joining us.

DONNA SHIRLEY: You're quite welcome.

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