QUESTION:
What is the significance of the Mars Pathfinder mission?

ANSWER from Bridget Landry on November 16, 1998:
That's quite a broad question!  I would say that the its significance
lay
in showing that space missions could be done in a different way than
have
been done previously.  We worked with a much smaller team to build a
spacecraft that had a lot less redundancy (hence much more risk)--BUT it
was done with a much smaller budget and on a much shorter timescale (3
years from first funding to launch) than usual and it still returned
good,
useable science and engineering data.  Pathfinder also used concurrent
engineering, meaning that the hardware and the software were developed
at
the same time; most missions build the instruments and the spacecraft,
THEN
develope the required software.  (This is one way we were able to
compress
the developement time down to three years.)  Being a smaller spacecraft
(the joke is, if you melted Pathfinder down, it would fit into the fuel
tanks for Galileo, the mission that is currently in orbit at Jupiter),
it
had fewer instruments than an "old style" space mission: 5, instead of
12
or 15.  This also allowed the software to be simpler, since it had fewer
things to accomplish.

All these things add up to the fact that it doesn't require billions of
dollars a shot to explore our solar system.  Pathfinder proved that, if
you're willing to run a little risk, you can get a lot of valuable data
from small, relatively simple spacecraft.

Bridget Landry
Deputy Uplink System Engineer
Mars Pathfinder