We Smile -- Looking Back 25 Years, Now At JPL... And Some Purple... Glory... Which Opened An Entirely New Era, On Barsoom

That first lil' rover was more a demo project than anything else.

Even so, it proved that all these later "mighty things" could be accomplished, over 40 million miles away, into the night sky. . . like a coal, rising. . . with a moan. We too were personally entering a new era that year. . . hard to figure where the time went. But go, it did. Smile. . . .

Though we now fly helicopters on Barsoom, we do fondly remember those first few sweet nights, over a X486 desktop, and 9600 Baud dial up modem:

. . .When a daring team of engineers put a lander and the first rover on the Red Planet a quarter century ago, they changed how the world explores.

On a July evening in 1997, Jennifer Trosper drove home from work at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory holding a picture of the Martian surface to her steering wheel. Earlier that day, the agency’s Pathfinder mission had landed on Mars encased in protective air bags and taken the image of the red, rubbly landscape that transfixed her.

“As I was on the freeway, I had that image on my steering wheel and kept looking at it,” Trosper said, reminiscing. “I probably should have been looking more closely at the road.”

Given that Trosper was the mission’s flight director, her excitement was understandable. Not only had Pathfinder landed on Mars, a feat all its own, but it had done so at a fraction of the cost and time required of previous Mars missions. And, the next day, the team was set to change the course of Mars exploration forever: They had sent instructions to Pathfinder to extend a ramp so that history’s first Mars rover, Sojourner, could roll down onto the planet’s surface. . . .

Believing that nothing exceeds. . . like excess -- we still await a vision, of St. Elmo's Fire -- from the chopper now zipping over the surface of Mars. That would indeed be a sight to behold (even as a digital streaming HD file).

And as we've said -- since the stunt would pose no danger to the craft -- I think the team ought to have the mast cam on the Perseverance rover authorized to just shoot a lil' footage -- of a late evening lift-off and short flight -- and soon (while everything is working perfectly as designed). It could be to commemorate that night, 25 years ago.

What a would we live in, now. . . robotic cinematography, all forty million miles distant, across the vast silent blackness of space. Whoosh. . . grinning ear to ear.

नमस्ते