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Mars rover Curiosity's other mission: PR

Science is not the only objective of the Curiosity mission on Mars. Promoting the mission at a time of budget cuts is also crucial.

December 01, 2012|By Amina Khan, Los Angeles Times
  • Pop music star speaks to students during an educational program at Jet Propulsion Laboratory in August. His song "Reach for the Stars" has helped promote JPL's Curiosity rover mission on Mars.
Pop music star speaks to students during an educational program… (Anne Cusack, Los Angeles…)

NASA's Curiosity rover was designed to search Mars for places capable of supporting life. But the $2.5-billion mission has another, unofficial objective: To serve as a goodwill ambassador for the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in La Cañada Flintridge at a time when funding for planetary exploration is in jeopardy.


"All the Mars rovers have been very good public outreach," said Alan Stern, a planetary scientist at the Southwest Research Institute. The bells and whistles of the Curiosity program, he said, represent "the next generation of doing it in a more modern way."

The efforts appear to be paying off. Interest in the Mars Science Laboratory mission, as it's officially known, has grown so intense that JPL staffers who normally promote the rover's doings are working to ratchet down expectations for a scientific presentation Monday at the American Geophysical Union meeting in San Francisco. With pundits speculating in the blogosphere that Curiosity had found ingredients for life in the Martian soil, the lab released a statement this week saying the rover did not have "definitive evidence" of organic material.

'Sputnik surprise'


NASA was formed as a response to the 1957 "Sputnik surprise," when the Soviet Union launched the first man-made satellite. "The United States suddenly spent a whole lot of money on science and engineering," said JPL historian Erik Conway.

NASA channeled billions of those dollars to high-profile missions at JPL. It poured about $1billion into the Viking program that sent two landers to Mars in the 1970s and spent $865million on the twin Voyager probes that visited Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus and Neptune in the 1970s and 1980s.


But as the Cold War thawed, the appetite for big-budget efforts waned. The agency's budget fell by about 18% between 1992 and 1999, and Daniel Goldin, who led NASA at the time, pushed for "faster, better, cheaper" missions.

A turning point came in 1997, when JPL's skateboard-sized rover Sojourner landed on Mars. Spending only $265million, engineers made some creative decisions, including using the nascent World Wide Web to disseminate photos and information to space enthusiasts.










Some of the doo-dads are built right into the latest rover, like the two microchips with the names of more than 1.2 million earthlings who wanted to travel to the Red Planet in some small way. Then there's the augmented-reality tags that are still awaiting their raison d'etre — they were stuck on proactively, in case the team came up with an interesting app after landing.

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