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Mars Exploration Rover (MER) Missions Interview with
NASA Ames Research Center planetary geologist Jeff Moore

Recorded January 8, 2004, at NASA Ames Research Center, Moffett Field, Calif.

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Full Transcript (below)


10.Please compare the NASA 1976 Viking missions to Mars to the MER missions to the red planet. (1:16 MINUTES)

Jeff Moore: "Well, right away one can say of the two 1996 – pardon me – 1976 landings – Vikings 1 and 2 – is that they were about ten times as expensive as missions as the two rover missions are. So, right away, whatever science we get back from the rover missions, one has to remember that they’re being done on the cheap relatively speaking to the cost of those very sophisticated – for their time – missions of the 1970’s. And despite the fact that those 1970s missions were expensive, they had no mobility. They couldn’t rove anywhere. They did have a robot arm, which could reach out, grab dirt off the surface and put it inside various detectors built into the body of the spacecraft. And the principal thing those detectors did was look for existing life – life that actually would – ah – be’d juvenated inside the spacecraft, and shown to metabolize. Whereas, the two rovers we sent are not looking for living organisms. They’re looking for evidence of past – ah – evidence for past standing bodies of water.”

Multimedia Archive | MER Missions with Jeff Moore