PASADENA, Calif. - Thanks to stratospheric growth in the internet, interest in the Mars Polar Lander and Deep Space 2 missions could well rival that garnered by the Mars Pathfinder, which drew huge audiences -- 521 million hits in July 1997 alone -- after landing on the Red Planet.
"The Internet has grown tremendously in the last two years. We expect an event as big as Pathfinder, if not bigger," said Kirk Goodall, the Mars web engineer for NASAs Jet Propulsion Laboratory. "The number we throw around is 1 billion hits" throughout the three-month mission.
At the time, Pathfinder was the biggest Internet event ever, attracting an estimated 188 million unique page hits. Although JPLs record has since been surpassed by other events, including the 1998 Olympic Games in Nagano, Japan, Polar Lander could restore the NASA center to its former perch.
Goodall said he was working to post more information and images on the missions main website (bolstered by an additional 20 mirror sites around the world) than was the case with Pathfinder.
The effort, he vows, will bring Mars closer to Earth than perhaps it has ever been for the enthusiast armed with only a decent modem-equipped computer.
Part of the plan includes routing black-and-white images of Mars onto the internet as soon as they are processed. The images will be available worldwide at the same instant as they will be to NASA scientists.
"The goal is someone can set up a computer in the backyard and put some hamburgers on the grill and watch the images as they come down," said Goodall, adding he came within hours of being able to do so during the Pathfinder mission. "It makes people feel part of the mission, like its their spacecraft."
The internet will also allow computer users to access the following features that were not available during Pathfinder:
-- A fishbowl-type webcam that will give an undistorted panoramic view of inside the Polar Lander Mission Support Area. A moveable window will allow internet users to zoom in on any part of the room they wish.
-- Ten-second sound bites from the Mars Microphone carried aboard the Polar Lander.
-- A "movie" made up of 10 still images taken by the Mars Descent Imager (MARDI) during the final 10 seconds from the time the lander's parachute deploys to until touchdown.
-- Streaming video of all mission press conferences from JPL and the University of California, Los Angeles.
Because of the loss of the Mars Climate Orbiter, which was to have acted as a communications relay satellite for the Polar Lander mission, the spacecraft will have to rely on the Mars Global Surveyor and its own on-board equipment to beam back data to Earth. Because of that, some images could be delayed in making it to the public, with the flood beginning by the missions third day. Initial engineering images should be available almost immediately, though.
"I hope to give the public a good show," Goodall said.
Even without the internet, the Polar Lander mission will likely have a significant impact on world news. JPL spokesman Franklin ODonnell said he expected 1,000 journalists would descend on the Pasadena laboratory for the mission -- about the same number that Pathfinder drew.
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