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Rover rolls over Martian surface
Sojourner makes history by sliding onto red planet
July 6, 1997
Web posted at: 9:54 a.m. EDT (1354 GMT)PASADENA, California (CNN) -- NASA's six-wheeled Martian rover rolled down a ramp Saturday night and into history, becoming humanity's first autonomous vehicle to travel on the surface of another planet.
Mission Control erupted into cheers and applause early Sunday morning when pictures from the Mars Pathfinder lander showed the microwave oven-sized Sojourner rover on the surface of the red planet.
The first pictures from Mars - a slide show
740K/30 sec. QuickTime movie
"The images that you see today show a perfectly deployed rover that has driven down a perfectly deployed ramp, making its first track in the soil of this planet, opening a new era of exploration," said rover project manager Jacob Matijevic at a late night news conference.
The solar-powered rover took four minutes to roll down the ramp and onto the surface. The 22-pound vehicle spent about an hour on the surface before it was shut down for the Martian night, and will begin analyzing rocks and soil in an on-board laboratory after Earthrise on Sunday.
When in doubt, hit reset
The successful roll-out topped a roller-coaster day of anxiety and excitement. After a wildly successful landing, mission engineers spent much of Saturday trying to solve a communications glitch between the rover and the lander that threatened Sojourner's Martian mission.
Mission managers still aren't certain what fixed the problem, which they believe was a software glitch. But when the crafts' systems were awakened Saturday night, communications between the two flowed smoothly, and the lander's ramps deployed to give Sojourner a path to the rocky surface.
"The spacecraft is fine. The lander is fine," mission manager Richard Cook said. "But we're a little perplexed as to what happened."
"It's just like having your screen lock up on you when you're using Microsoft Word or something," said rover operator Matt Wallace. "You've got to hit the reset button."
The computer on board the lander -- renamed Saturday in memory of astronomer Carl Sagan -- reset itself Friday night. Mission operators said the reset caused no problems, but they were looking for the cause of the hiccup.
Scientists view panoramic pictures of the Martian surface
Tracks in the red soil
NASA mission managers pieced together an eight-frame "video" of Sojourner rolling down the ramp and onto the planet, where it left clear tracks in the dusty red soil.
"We can report visually six wheels on soil," flight director Chris Salvo announced shortly after 2 a.m. EDT Sunday.
The little vehicle begins its mission in earnest Sunday, but the scientists back on Earth are already thrilled with what they've seen.
"We've already seen differences in colors and textures," said project scientist Matthew Golombek. "There looks like there's layering in some rocks."
Golombek and his fellow scientists must now decide what to look at first, as Sojourner's Earth-side operators learn to drive it.
Miami Bureau Chief John Zarrella and Reuters contributed to this report.
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Related sites:
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- National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA)
- NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory
- Pathfinder Landing Timeline
- Mars Pathfinder Mission
- Mars Global Surveyor
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