Pink Rover Goes to Mars, 20 years later

Twenty years up to now, NASA’s Different rover landed on Mars. Its twin, Spirit, had reached the ground three weeks earlier. The two robotic space geologists would usher in a model new interval of Mars exploration and guarantee liquid water as quickly as flowed on the planet’s flooring.

At NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California, a world group of extreme schoolers watched Different’s dramatic descent alongside scientists and engineers engaged on the mission. The students had been part of The Planetary Society’s Purple Rover Goes to Mars program, a partnership with LEGO to engage and educate most people, and supplies school college students alternate options to participate in Mars missions.

Among the many many “pupil astronauts,” as they’d been generally known as, was Abigail Fraeman. After the celebration of a worthwhile landing and a raucous press conference, she and totally different contributors watched with the science employees as a result of the rover’s first pictures arrived, exhibiting it had come to a rest inside a shallow crater.

“These pictures merely hooked me completely, because of they confirmed a picture of Mars that was not like one other picture of Mars we’d ever seen,” talked about Fraeman not too way back. “It truly confirmed me that Mars is a spot we are going to uncover, and there’s a lot we have not seen.”

The experience glad Fraeman to pursue a occupation in space. Inside the time it took her to earn a Ph.D. in planetary science, Different was nonetheless exploring Mars on what grew to grow to be a 14-year mission, although the rover was solely imagined to ultimate 90 days. In a full-circle second, Fraeman grew to grow to be the deputy enterprise scientist for the Different mission. Now, she is the deputy enterprise scientist for the Curiosity mission.

“It’s not an exaggeration to say that this program truly modified my life,” she talked about of Purple Rover Goes to Mars.

Quotes on this text had been drawn from an interview on Planetary Radio and have been edited for readability and brevity.