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There was, of course, no one in Mars' Ares Vallis floodplain to mark the moment when NASA's 3-ft.-tall Pathfinder spacecraft dropped into the soil of the long-dry valley. But there was a planet more than 100 million miles away filled with people who were paying heed...
Just getting Pathfinder from Cape Canaveral to Ares Vallis required a remarkable bit of cosmic sharpshooting. Mars is only 4,200 miles across--about half as big as Earth--and the floodplain NASA was aiming for is only 60 miles wide. The barest flutter in the spacecraft's trajectory could...
Preliminary readings from the ship indicated that landing conditions were well within what the engineers had expected. Pathfinder was tilted at an angle of less than 3[degrees], plenty flat enough to allow the rover to disembark. The solar arrays were being bathed by sun and were producing all the...
Though Sojourner won't get anywhere fast, where it does go should hold a lot of secrets. Ares Vallis was chosen as the landing site in the first place because the now dusty basin was once the largest known floodplain in the solar system. Water rushed into the valley at...
What was perhaps most remarkable about the spacecraft that set up shop in Ares Vallis late last week is how unremarkable they are. NASA's early interplanetary spacecraft--the Vikings, the Pioneers, the Voyagers--were limousine ships packed with dozens of scientific instruments and countless backup systems. On the surface...