Engineering Education “Today in History” Blog: Pathfinder lands on Mars
by Alice Agogino
closeAuthor: Alice Agogino
Name: Alice Agogino
Email: agogino@berkeley.edu
Site: http://www.me.berkeley.edu/faculty/agogino/
About: Alice M. Agogino is the Roscoe and Elizabeth Hughes Professor of Mechanical Engineering and is affiliated faculty at the Haas School of Business in their Operations and Information Technology Management Group. Her research interests include: community-based design; sustainable engineering; intelligent learning systems; information retrieval and data mining; multiobjective and strategic product design; nonlinear optimization; probabilistic modeling; intelligent control and manufacturing; sensor validation, fusion and diagnostics; wireless sensor networks; multimedia and computer-aided design; design databases; design theory and methods; MEMS/NEMS synthesis and computer-aided design; artificial intelligence and decision and expert systems; and gender/ethnic equity.
She has served in a number of administrative positions at UC Berkeley, including Chair of the Faculty Senate, Associate Dean of Engineering and Faculty Assistant to the Executive Vice Chancellor and Provost in Educational Development and Technology. Prof. Agogino also served as Director for Synthesis, an NSF-sponsored coalition of eight universities with the goal of reforming undergraduate engineering education, and continues as PI for the NEEDS (www.needs.org) and SMETE.ORG digital libraries of courseware in science, mathematics, engineering and technology.
Prof. Agogino received a B.S. in Mechanical Engineering from the University of New Mexico (1975), M.S. degree in Mechanical Engineering (1978) from the University of California at Berkeley and Ph.D. from the Department of Engineering-Economic Systems at Stanford University (1984). Prior to joining the faculty at UC Berkeley, she worked in industry for Dow Chemical, General Electric and SRI International. She has authored over 150 scholarly publications; has won numerous teaching, best paper and research awards; and is a member of the National Academy of Engineering (NAE). At NAE she served on the Committee on Engineering Education, working on the Technologically Speaking and the Engineer 2020 projects. She is currently a member of the National Research Council's Board on Education and the Women in Academic Science Engineering Committee. She has supervised 66 MS projects/theses, 26 doctoral dissertations and numerous undergraduate researchers.See Authors Posts (333) · July 4th, 2009 · Add a Comment
Today in History – July 4, 1997 – Launched on December 4, 1996, Pathfinder impacted the surface of Mars on July 4, 1997 at a velocity of 18 m/s (40 mph) and then bounced into the air 15 times at a maximum height of 15 meters (50 feet), before rolling and coming to rest 1 km from the initial impact site. The lander and landing site was named the Carl Sagan Memorial Station. Pathfinder was designed, built and operated by the Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) for NASA.
The Sojourner Rover (above left) carried by Pathfinder rolled onto the Mars’ surface two days later on July 6. Click on the image above right to see a video of its initial positioning.
The project ended on March 10, 1998 when the lander failed to respond to communicate with controllers at JPL. The mission operated three times longer than its original 30-day planned lifetime. I was honored to have served on the Advisory Board for the Engineering Division at JPL and was impressed with their “faster, better, cheaper” approach to space exploration.
The images from Pathfinder-Sojourner are spectacular, ranging from videos of Martian sunsets (click on image above left to see movie), data on the composition of the Martian rocks and the role of water on Mars. Quoting from a NASA press release of June 29, 1998:
The current assessment of data from this instrument suggests that all of the rocks studied by the rover resemble a type of volcanic rock with a high silicon content known on Earth as andesite, covered with a fine layer of dust. All of the rocks appear to be chemically far different from meteorites discovered. on Earth that are believed to have come from Mars.
For more information, see the Engineering Pathway’s resources on the Pathfinder mission and space exploration. For related educational resources, visit the Aerospace Engineering Education, Engineering Mechanics Engineering Education, Computer Engineering Education or the Mechatronics Engineering Education Community sites.
Tags: Aerospace Engineering · Earth Sciences · General Engineering, Engineering Science
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