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By Ana A. Lima
Arizona Daily Wildcat
December 5, 1996
As the countdown reached zero early yesterday morning, a blazing tale of fire could be seen in the Florida sky, and the Imager from Mars Pathfinder, on a Delta Rocket, quickly accelerated to 10,700 miles per hour within three minutes.The Imager was designed by members of the University of Arizona Lunar and Planetary Laboratory as a part of a series of space discovery projects funded by NASA.
Yesterday's launch from Cape Canaveral, Fla., at 1:58 a.m. EST, marked NASA's third attempt this week to send the Imager on its mission to photograph the red planet's atmosphere and surface.
Four UA graduates, two undergraduates and one high school student participated in building the Imager.
"The project has made a good attempt to provide jobs to graduate students and to get high school students interested in science," Greg Hoppa, planetary sciences graduate and member of the Imager calibration team.
NASA had a 28-day launch window, starting Dec. 2, to launch the Pathfinder. If delayed longer than that time frame, the mission would have been aborted, Hoppa said.
"If it had been delayed a couple weeks, then I think people would be getting nervous," he said.
Now that it has left Earth, the Imager should take seven months to land on Mars. The expected landing date is July 4, when scientists will receive the first pictures from Mars since two similar projects named Viking landed in 1976.
The total cost for the Imager was $6 million. In today's figures, the Viking project would have cost $35 million, said Devon Crowe, senior staff engineer at the Lunar and Planetary Laboratory and calibration manager for the Imager.
Immediately following landing, signals will be received by a series of antennas called a deep space network.
The images will first be sent to the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif., where a team of UA researchers will be stationed, Crowe said.
Hoppa, who joined the Imager team in the spring of 1995, said working on this project has actually made him a better student. It gave him "motivation to do a better job," he said.
Members of the team who went to Florida for the launch are expected back in Tucson Monday.
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