“ . . . the Mars landing may signal the start of a new interactive era in the mass consumption of news . . . “

– The New York Times, July 14, 1997

By Brian Dunbar, Internet Services Manager

Twenty years ago, NASA landed a little rover on Mars . . . and blew up the Internet. As people clamored for pictures – overwhelming servers and bringing network traffic to a standstill – it became obvious that something fundamental had changed on how people expected to get information about NASA missions.

Image Credit: NASA

NASA, through its Jet Propulsion Laboratory in California, had begun to release information online following Voyager’s encounters with Uranus and Neptune in the 1980s.

“When I arrived at JPL in 1985, I was already active in some of the online networks of the day such as CompuServe, so distributing pictures and information about NASA missions that way seemed natural,” said former JPL public information manager Frank O’Donnell. “Also, Ron Baalke at JPL was very active posting information to Usenet, the Internet-based system of newsgroups. At the end of the '80s, I established a dialup bulletin board system at JPL, which members of the public could dial into directly to download pictures and text files.”

Then, in 1993, came the discovery of Comet Shoemaker-Levy 9, and astronomers’ realization that it would hit Jupiter in July 1994. By then scientists were communicating by e-mail, transferring large files around the world and posting their work for discussion on the nascent World Wide Web. Now they were using those tools to plan worldwide campaign to observe the collision

NASA’s public affairs office followed suit, scheduling briefings throughout the encounter. (The comet had fragmented into numerous pieces that would arrive at Jupiter over several days.) The schedule published the time images were expected to be received and when they would be discussed on NASA TV.

Naturally, Internet users started banging on NASA websites a few minutes before the pictures were scheduled to be downlinked, unable to wait until the scheduled release time. As Philip C. Plait wrote in “Bad Astronomy”, “. . . the web nearly screeched to a halt due to the overwhelming amount of traffic as people tried to find pictures of the event from different observatories.”

The excitement wasn’t limited to the public. Scientists found themselves doing their work live on NASA TV, as this clip from a National Geographic special shows. By coincidence it was also around this time that NASA’s Office of Public Affairs announced that it would no longer mail news releases to reporters, but would instead distribute them online.