- PASADENA (www.nandotimes.com) -- During its months scrambling around Mars,
the rover Sojourner came across evidence of two vastly different worlds
on the Red Planet: one warm and wet, and one rocky and dry.
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- A year after NASA dropped the Pathfinder
lander and its rover on the Martian surface, project scientists drew a
picture of Mars that keeps alive the hope of finding some sort of life.
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- Scientists said Monday there is evidence
of an ancient world that was warm, wet and possibly hospitable to life
long ago, and a dry rocky world that has changed little in at least 2 billion
years.
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- Some sort of climate change divided the
wet and dry periods, but scientists don't yet know what it was, project
manager Matthew Golombek said during a review of the $266 million mission's
scientific results.
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- The picture of Mars drawn from initial
data "held up fairly well with our subsequent scientific analysis,"
he said at a briefing at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory.
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- Pathfinder, which radioed data back to
Earth until last September, detected that 3 billion to 4.5 billion years
ago, the Martian surface teemed with fast-flowing water that deposited
some of the boulders seen by Pathfinder's cameras.
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- The so-called Twin Peaks that dominate
the hills on the landing site horizon appear to be islands shaped by water.
And Pathfinder found rock conglomerations and pebbles that suggested water
in the past.
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- But Golombek said Pathfinder pictures
also suggest the area has been "dry and static" for the last
2 billion years. Only erosion from wind has changed the scene, stripping
away 2-3 inches of surface material, he said.
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- "The surface has undergone very
small, if any, changes at all," Golombek said as he showed the latest
360-degree video images of the landing site.
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- Rich Zurek, the project scientist for
the 1998 Mars Climate Orbiter and Mars Polar Lander -- both to be launched
in December -- said NASA's next missions to Mars will continue the search
for water. The next lander will be equipped with an arm that can dig a
few feet to see if water is hiding beneath the surface.
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- With the whole world watching, Pathfinder
bounced to a stop on the Martian surface on July 4, 1997. Its rover Sojourner
rolled about 300 feet, analyzed rocks and took more than 500 pictures.
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- The mission demonstrated a low-cost and
reliable way to land on a planet using a cushion of giant airbags and showed
that a robotic rover could scurry around and carry out commands radioed
from Earth.
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- After nearly a year of analysis, scientists
say all the rocks examined by the rover's alpha proton X-ray spectrometer
seem to be made of high-silicon volcanic rock known as andesite -- also
found in Iceland and the Galapagos Islands here on Earth.
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