When you hear the words “Mars rover,” you probably picture of one of the modern rovers like Perseverance or Curiosity: camera-covered, laser-toting, nuclear-powered monster trucks with wheels the size of barrels, trundling across Mars with all the urgency of a Jawa sandcrawler to study rocks and dust. Or, if you’re a little older, you might imagine their predecessors, the smaller, solar-powered twin Mars Exploration Rovers Spirit and Opportunity, who raced across Barsoom like Labrador puppies on a beach, hopscotching from crater to crater and going up and down more hills than the Grand Old Duke of York.
But none of those would have even been built if it wasn’t for the amazing success of a much smaller, much less-sophisticated rover named Sojourner that landed on Mars 25 years ago today, long before these modern machines. Not much bigger than a microwave oven, it weathered a daring landing cocooned inside airbags, then didn’t just survive but thrived on Mars, carrying out useful science and sending back fascinating pictures before its mission ended. Sojourner paved the way for the high-tech rovers currently rolling across Mars in the same way that the canvas and cane Wright Flyer Kitty Hawk paved the way for the fighter jets and airliners in our skies today.
The story of Sojourner
More recent entrants to the space enthusiast fold might be most familiar with Sojourner following the rover’s cameo in the film The Martian. Although the way it followed Mark Watney around the hab like a pet dog was as realistic as the film’s dust storm, it was sweet and it’s just one of many things I forgive that film for.
But what is the real story of Sojourner?
Launched Dec. 4, 1996, aboard a Delta II rocket, Sojourner was part of the Mars Pathfinder mission: a low-budget program to send a lander and a small test rover to Mars to see whether it was even possible to operate a wheeled vehicle on the Red Planet.
And Sojourner certainly was small. Weighing only 25 pounds (11.5 kilograms) and measuring just 11 inches (28 centimeters) high and 25 inches (63 cm) long, it really was the size of a microwave oven. But despite its diminutive stature, little Sojourner had big goals. It had front and rear cameras and a variety of instruments designed to perform limited but valuable science. Its most striking features, however, were its flat topside covered in metallic blue solar panels, which many thought made it look like a giant beetle, and its six small, spiky wheels, which gave the rover real Robot Wars appeal.
As nothing like it had ever been tried before, hopes weren’t exactly sky high that Sojourner would work. Many thought that if it did work, it wouldn’t work for long and would die after driving a couple dozen yards over seven or so sols (days) on Mars — its planned mission length. But after landing safely on July 4, 1997, Sojourner exceeded all expectations.
The Mars Pathfinder lander set down in an area called Ares Valles — which, by the way, is nowhere near, and looks absolutely nothing like, the place Watney digs the rover out of the sand in The Martian. Ares Valles is essentially the dried-up remains of a huge channel carved out of the surface of Mars by violent floods billions of years ago.
When Pathfinder’s first images came back, they showed an orange-brown landscape strewn with boulders, some of which were quite large and almost all of them bearing signs of tumbling, cracking, and splitting by flooding that once swept down the valley. Those images caused a sensation because Pathfinder was the first real space mission of the Internet Age — when NASA began posting images daily, there was so much interest in them that the fledgling Internet almost broke under the pressure. People around the world viewed and downloaded the images as soon as they appeared, which both gave the mission an incredible public profile and showed that there was a huge appetite for “live” images sent back from out there. Many of the space enthusiasts who now download the raw images sent back by Curiosity and Perseverance and use them to create beautiful panoramas and views, including myself, first got into image processing because of those first Sojourner photos.
Sojourner: The microwave-sized rover that showed us Mars
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