Randy Cassingham's Blog

The Jet Propulsion Laboratory's Mars Pathfinder and Sojourner rover have completed their primary mission on Mars, returning 9,669 pictures of the surface and a huge amount of other scientific data about our red neighbor.

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As the hardware (and funding) lasts, an "extended mission" will continue to gather data, with Pathfinder continuing to run around sniffing rocks and taking snapshots for the folks back home. Is anyone on Earth besides NASA geeks interested in this stuff? You bet: during the primary mission, JPL's Mars Exploration Program web site recorded 565 million hits (with a one-day count on July 8 of 47 million -- possibly a WWW record). Dozens of sites all around the world are mirroring the data to help handle the enormous load of people not served by the scant coverage (after the first week, anyway) in the mainstream news media.

I'm proud that True is sent to a number of people at JPL, including a certain "Chief Martian" who did a great job explaining the mission to a worldwide television audience eager to see the success of a little bit of ingenuity and a lot of hard work. Last week's story "Knock Before Entering" is dedicated to you all.

I worked at JPL from 1986 until 1996, when I quit to work full time in online publishing.