Mars Pathfinder, robotic U.S. spacecraft launched to Mars to reveal a brand new option to land a spacecraft on the planet’s floor and the operation of an impartial robotic rover. Developed by NASA as a part of a low-cost strategy to planetary exploration, Pathfinder efficiently accomplished each demonstrations, gathered scientific data, and returned hanging photos from Mars. Its observations added to proof that, at a while in its historical past, Mars was rather more Earth-like than it’s at the moment, with a hotter, thicker environment and rather more water.
Mars Pathfinder was launched on December 4, 1996, and landed on Mars seven months later, on July 4, 1997. Because it descended by way of the Martian environment, it was slowed successively by a warmth protect, a parachute, and rockets. Its affect on the floor was cushioned by an enveloping cluster of air baggage, on which it bounced to relaxation—the primary time such a touchdown method had been tried. Its touchdown web site in Chryse Planitia (19° N, 33° W), about 850 km (530 miles) southeast of the placement of the Viking 1 lander, was on the mouth of a big flood channel.
The spacecraft consisted of two small components, a 370-kg (816-pound) lander and a ten.6-kg (23-pound) rover. As soon as on the floor, the lander was formally named the Carl Sagan Memorial Station after the Twentieth-century American astronomer. The rover was named Sojourner in honour of the Nineteenth-century African American civil rights advocate Sojourner Truth.
The six-wheeled Sojourner carried two black-and-white cameras used for navigating the floor, one color digital camera, and an alpha proton X-ray spectrometer for figuring out the composition of rocks and soil. Its most pace was 1 cm per second (2 toes per minute). It rolled down a ramp from the lander on July 5 and over the subsequent 21/2 months explored the neighborhood of the touchdown web site, accumulating knowledge on soil and a number of other particular person rocks. Sojourner relayed 550 photos to Earth by way of the lander.
Along with communication tools, the lander carried a stereo digital camera system that despatched again greater than 16,500 photos. The pictures portrayed Sojourner at work and offered a vivid view of the Martian floor. They had been additionally used to assist direct the rover, to analyze the Martian environment, and to measure wind route and pace. Pathfinder transmitted its final knowledge on September 27, 1997.
