Pathfinder Special Reports ....................................... July 3, 1997
A New Era In Space Exploration
WASHINGTON, DC - July 3, 1997 - The nation's top civil space leadership called the tiny Mars Pathfinder now approaching the red planet as a first "itty-bitty step" in the process of finding life on Mars. And senior managers said that it will serve as the model for all future NASA exploration of the planets of the solar system."Mars has an unbelievable pull on the imagination of the American people and people around the world," NASA Administrator Daniel Goldin said today at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif. The lab will be the control center for tomorrow's landing of the Pathfinder probe on Mars. Goldin said that the small craft -one of his new "faster, better, cheaper" scaled down and focused space missions, was "doing exploration differently this time- if we went the old way, we'd be waiting seven years to leave port." Goldin also praised the team assembled to control the landing mission, a total of some 200 people at JPL in California. "No matter what happens tomorrow, I want to congratulate these people for what they've done," Goldin said.
These sentiments were echoed by Dr. Wes Huntress, NASA Associate Administrator for Space Science. "They (at JPL) are the new pioneers, opening up a new era of Mars exploration." Huntress said that Pathfinder was the first in a decade long series of small missions to Mars, culminating in a 2005 sample return mission. "We're back -and this time to stay. We're beginning the process to determine the suitability of Mars as the next destination for human habitation." This long-term sustained series of missions will include an October rendezvous with Mars by the Mars Surveyor, a spacecraft that will continue the orbital mapping of the planet started in the 1976 Viking orbiter missions. Such a mission was also planned for the Mars Observer, a spacecraft that arrived at Mars in 1993 but was destroyed before it could complete its mission. As the NASA managers spoke, the Mars Pathfinder was fast approaching the planet - now less than 400,000 miles away. Would humans one day follow in the footsteps of Pathfinder? Goldin said that he had received a briefing from the Johnson Space Center- but that "it's still too expensive." He suggested that planners of human missions might take a page from the Pathfinder's book -and find a way to design a low-cost flight by astronauts that could be approved within the expected agency budgets of the next decades.
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