Volume 5, Number 5     September/October 1997

  Welcome to Innovation

Mars Pathfinder—Part of NASA's Discovery Program

HE DISCOVERY PROGRAM INCLUDES A NEW generation of low-cost spacecraft designed to explore the solar system. It is one of the first missions in a new decade-long NASA program of robotic exploration to expand knowledge of the solar system while developing a number of mission technologies with promising commercial applications. The Mars Pathfinder was launched in December 1996 aboard a Delta rocket and landed almost perfectly on Mars on July 4, 1997. The Pathfinder lander and rover have continued to collect a wealth of information about the Martian environment. The Mars rover, called Sojourner, is a robust robotic vehicle capable of semi-autonomous operation on the Mars surface.

This issue of Innovation focuses on Pathfinder successes and on some of the new technology that was developed for the Mars lander, named the Carl Sagan Memorial Station, and the rover Sojourner. The name Sojourner was chosen for the rover after a year-long, worldwide competition in which students up to
18 years old were invited to select and submit an essay about historical accomplishments of heroic women. The students were asked to address in their essays how a planetary rover named for their heroine would translate the accomplishments to the Martian environment.

Initiated in March 1994 by the Planetary Society of Pasadena, California, in cooperation with NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL), the contest began with an announcement in the January 1995 issue of the National Science Teachers Association's magazine Science and Children, which is circulated to 20,000 teachers around schools across the nation. Vallery Ambroise, now 15, of Bridgeport, Connecticut, submitted the winning essay about Sojourner Truth, an African-American reformist who lived during the Civil War era. An abolitionist and champion of women's rights, Sojourner Truth, whose legal name was Isabella Van Wagener, made it her mission to "travel up and down the land," advocating the rights of all people to be free and the rights of women to participate fully in society. The name Sojourner was selected because it means "traveler"—in this case on the planet Mars.

Vallery Ambroise visits the White House and meets with Vice President Gore. Ms. Ambroise named the rover after Sojourner Truth.

To use the Pathfinder technology in commercial products, novel partnerships between industry and NASA have created unique opportunities for the JPL Commercial Technology program to link with the private sector and entrepreneurs. The outcome desired is new products and services to contribute to the U.S. economy and public quality of life.

The Pathfinder was also a challenging project of national importance in which small and small disadvantaged businesses played high-tech roles by providing necessary off-the-shelf commodities, support services and technical personnel. These businesses were responsible for major research and development innovations in space products, hardware and software, which allowed the craft to operate in unknown extraterrestrial environments where human repair operations are impossible.

JPL's Mars Pathfinder owes a major part of its success to an innovative melding of highly reliable, commercial, off-the-shelf components and new cutting-edge NASA technologies. The Pathfinder has emerged as the quintessential model for NASA's faster, better, cheaper paradigm. Built in less than two years, it returned all the data for its one-month nominal mission in its first two and a half weeks on Mars. As of this publication, it continues to return valuable information on the Mars environment as well as data on the innovative mission technology.

While Pathfinder embraced the basic Discovery program charter that encourages use of available hardware, it also tested a number of novel systems, components and software, some showing great commercial promise. The same may be said for the Mars Exploration program as a whole, which plans a decade of inexpensive missions. This issue of Innovation features emerging technologies derived from the Mars mission. This Mars Pathfinder mission is the first of its kind, but not the last. We expect many new technologies to be developed for the future missions and that many of them will quickly find their way into other nonaerospace uses. We will keep you informed about them and how they might improve our lives through future issues of Innovation.