Mars Pathfinder

The Pathfinder mission was a NASA project to send a payload and rover to the surface of Mars. The landing Pathfinder and rover (Sojourner) were developed on a fixed time (3 years), fixed budget ($200 million plus $50 million for the launch rocker). Compared to the Viking project ($3 billion in 1992 dollars) this was cheap. Plus, it returned significantly more data than Viking ever did.

Some detail of how this was done is in The Mars Pathfinder Approach to Faster-Better-Cheaper ISBN 0944002749 .

For an explanation of the PriorityInversion bug that caused software resets a few days into the mission, and how it was fixed, see <http://research.microsoft.com/~mbj/Mars_Pathfinder/>.

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I see lots of similarities between the Pathfinder mission described in the book and ExtremeProgramming. -- HankRoark

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Not to mention lots 'o pretty pictures:

  http://dir.yahoo.com/Science/Space/Exploration/Missions/Mars/Pathfinder/
  http://dir.yahoo.com/Entertainment/Humor__Jokes__and_Fun/By_Topic/Science/Astronomy_Humor/Mars_Pathfinder/
  http://dir.yahoo.com/Government/Politics/Political_Opinion/Conspiracy/United_States/Mars_Pathfinder/

-- JustSomeYahoo? (...obviously ;-)

BrokenLinks??

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See MarsPolarLander.

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CategoryBook