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Search indexed NASA NTRS and DOE OSTI research on propulsion, heat transfer, battery materials and energy systems. Follow report and document links to the original sources.
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The Web Interface for Telescience (WITS) is an Internet-based tool that the Mars Pathfinder mission used for both mission operations at JPL and public outreach.
The development of the Mars pathfinder is considered with emphasis on the End-to-End Information System (EEIS) development approach. The primary mission objective is to successfully develop and deliver a single flight system to the Martian surface, demonstrating entry, descent and landing. The EEIS is a set of functions distributed throughout the flight, ground and Mission Operation Systems (MOS) that inter-operate in order to control, collect, transport, process, store and analyze the uplink and downlink information flows of the mission. Coherence between the mission systems is achieved though the EEIS architecture. The key characteristics of the system are: a concurrent engineering approach for the development of flight, ground and mission operation systems; the fundamental EEIS architectural heuristics; a phased incremental EEIS development and test approach, and an EEIS design deploying flight, ground and MOS operability features, including integrated ground and flight based toolsets.
As part of the Discovery Program, NASA Plans to launch a series of probes to Mars. The Mars Pathfinder project is the first of this series with a scheduled Mars arrival in July 1997. The entry vehicle will perform a direct entry into the atmosphere and deliver a lander to the surface. Predicting the entry vehicle's flight performance and designing the forebody heatshield requires knowledge of the expected aerothermodynamic environment. Much of this knowledge can be obtained through computational fluid dynamic (CFD) analysis.
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Sections of this discussion include: a mission overview of the Mars Pathfinder Project; battery requirements; Ag-Zn technology assessment; EM battery performance; and summary and conclusions.
Preliminary analysis of CRISM imaging of the Mars Pathfinder landing site is consistent with previously reported results from landed imaging. At tens of meters scale, the surface is largely dust-covered. Lee portions of topographic knobs are reddest and show most evidence for ferric mineralogy. The nearby 1.5-km diameter "Big Crater" exposes olivine, which is atypical of the northern plains. Big Crater may have penetrated northern plains material to expose buried basaltic highlands.
The Mars Pathfinder Meteorological Package (ASI/MET) will measure the local pressure, temperature, and winds at its future landing site, somewhere between the latitudes 0 deg N and 30 deg N. Comparable measurements have already been obtained at the surface of Mars by the Viking Landers at 22 deg N (VL1) and 48 deg N (VL2), providing much useful information on the martian atmosphere. In particular the pressure measurements contain very instructive information on the global atmospheric circulation. At the Laboratoire de Meteorologie Dynamique (LMD), we have analyzed and simulated these measurements with a martian atmospheric global circulation model (GCM), which was the first to simulate the martian atmospheric circulation over more than 1 year. The model is able to reproduce rather accurately many observed features of the martian atmosphere, including the long- and short-period oscillations of the surface pressure observed by the Viking landers. From a meteorological point of view, we think that a landing site located near or at the equator would be an interesting choice.
Presently the landing site for Mars Pathfinder will be constrained to latitudes between 0 deg and 30 deg N to facilitate communication with earth and to allow the lander and rover solar arrays to generate the maximum possible power. The reference elevation of the site must also be below 0 km so that the descent parachute, a Viking derivative, has sufficient time to open and slow the lander to the correct terminal velocity. Although Mars has as much land surface area as the continental crust of the earth, such engineering constraints immediately limit the number of possible landing sites to only three broad areas: Amazonis, Chryse, and Isidis Planitia. Of these, both Chryse and Isidis Planitia stand out as the sites offering the most information to address several broad scientific topics.
The Imager for Mars Pathfinder Super Pan image cubes were combined using Superresolution to produce a data set with a factor of two higher spatial resolution than the starting products. The data product is presented.
Atmospheric temperature measurement at three heights with thin wire thermocouples on the 1.1 m Mars Pathfinder meteorology must allow estimates of the integral scale of the atmospheric thermal turbulence during an 83 sol period that begins in the summer. The integral scale is a measure for regions of perturbations. In turbulent media that roughly characterizes locations where the perturbations are correlated. Excluding some to intervals with violent excursions of the mean temperatures, integral scale values are found that increase relatively rapidly from a few tenths meters or less near down to several meters by mid-morning. During mid-morning, the diurnal and shorter time scale wind direction variations often place the meteorology mast in the thermal wake of the Lander.
The Microrover Flight Experiment (MFEX) is a NSAS OACT (Office of Advanced Concepts and Technology) flight experiment which, integrated with the Mars Pathfinder (MPF) lander and spacecraft system, landed on Mars on July 4, 1997.
Two multi-body drop tests were conducted to provide data to calibrate and verify a multi-body dynamics computer model, which was the major analytical tool used to study the entry, descent and landing (EDL) of the Mars Pathfinder mission. A general summary of the tests and important features of the simulation model are presented in this paper. Good correlation between between test results and analytical predictions were achieved.
The Microrover Flight Experiment (MFEX) is a NASA OACT flight experiment which is planned to be delivered and integrated with the Mars Pathfinder (MPF) lander and spacecraft system for landing on Mars on July 4, 1997.
A mechanically pumped single-phase cooling loop was successfully flown on the Mars Pathfinder (MPF) Spacecraft which safely landed on the Martian surface on July 4, 1997. One of the key technologies that enabled the mission to succeed was an active heat rejection system (HRS) used to cool the electronics on the spacecraft during its seven-month cruise from Earth to Mars.
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This paper presents a final report on the Reduction and Analysis of Meteorology Data from the Mars Pathfinder Lander.
Detailed measurements of rocks in the far field at the Mars Pathfinder landing site are consistent with the near field exponential drop off in the cumulative number or area covered by large diameter rocks (and with similar behavior at the Viking sites).
Surface features related to the wind are observed in data from the Mars Pathfinder lander and from orbit by the Viking Orbiter and Mars Global Surveyor missions. Features seen from the surface include wind tails associated with small rocks, barchanoid duneforms, ripplelike patterns, and ventifact flutes cut into some rocks. Features seen from orbit include wind tails associated with impact craters, ridges inferred to be duneforms, and modified crater rims interpreted to have been eroded and mantled by windblown material. The orientations of these features show two prevailing directions, one inferred to represent winds from the northeast which is consistent with strongest winds predicted by a general circulation model to occur during the Martian northern winter under current conditions, and a second wind pattern oriented approx. 90 degrees to the first. This latter wind could be from the W-NW or from the E-SE and was responsible for cutting the ventifacts and modifying the crater rims. The two wind regimes could reflect a change in climate related to Mars' obliquity or some other, unknown factor. Regardless of the cause, the MPF area has been subjected to a complex pattern of winds and supply of small particles, in which the original surface formed by sedimentary processes from Tiu and Ares Vallis events has been modified by repeated burial and exhumation.