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 Mars Pathfinder Online

Tenagra Award Winner in Category 2:

Online Public Relations Success

This category recognizes significant public relations success and innovation using the Internet. Public relations success may be illustrated as successful promotion of a brand or organization, creation of media attention, a successful online crisis management campaign, improvement of corporate image or development of new public relations strategies.

The National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) is recognized for the 1997 Tenagra Award for Internet Marketing Excellence because of its groundbreaking accomplishments in using the Internet to communicate with the public about the 1997 Mars Pathfinder mission.

By placing a wide spectrum of informational resources up and online incredibly quickly, and doing it in an extremely interactive fashion, the Mars Pathfinder online effort became the defining Internet public relations event of 1997, garnering incredible online traffic along with print and online press coverage worldwide. NASA reportedly recorded over 100 million hits in one weekend on just the main Pathfinder web server, as people had a chance to access a variety of resources ì including the ability to roam the Martian terrain in 3-D.

Over the past five years, NASA has led other government organizations and the business community at large by taking a leadership role in using the web as a tool to effectively publicize its mission and communicate with the public and its other stakeholders. At a time of very tight budgets, NASA had the foresight to realize that investing in public communications over the Internet was a good choice to make with its limited dollars. Through its online efforts, NASA has shown real vision in understanding that the Internet is a tool that allows them to provide a better return to its customer; the American public (and humanity at large).

The Mars Pathfinder web site succeeds through the intelligent deployment of sophisticated online tools. This project was a concerted online public relations effort that featured live press conferences on a regular basis, using online audio, video, still imagery and links to third party resources. Journalists were provided access to full, unedited information when preparing a story.

NASA also made a conscientious attempt to reach a broad spectrum of the public by providing specialized information streams for media, teachers, students, scientists, engineers and meteorologists. In anticipation of the huge volume of web site traffic, they coordinated with 20 mirror sites. Rather than being exclusive, this event was well-planned from the beginning to coordinate with dozens of different sites and user bases, and provided a number of top computer manufacturers an opportunity to support NASA's mission while demonstrating the capabilities of their hardware to support high-end applications. NASA went beyond entertainment or typical web site marketing and incorporated strong educational components in the site from the start. The site was so well done that it indeed became an important resource for scientists and NASA's own employees, and quite possibly had a large impact on government entities that might be responsible for NASA's funding.

Key individuals involved in the NASA Mars Pathfinder Online effort included:

For additional information, the July Issue of Web Review provided a behind the scenes look at how the Mars Pathfinder web development team accomplished the task of making their site available to a potential audience of more than 87 million visitors per day. See: