Word: crafting
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...touchdown was not without problems. Early pictures revealed that one of the airbags that cushioned the craft during its descent had bunched up in a way that hindered the rover from leaving the lander. In addition, the computer aboard Sojourner and the one aboard Pathfinder were having trouble communicating with each other, which prevented the rover from getting the information it needed to rove beyond the immediate vicinity of the lander. But these problems, which engineers promptly set about fixing, did little to dampen the excitement when Pathfinder sent back its stunning panoramas of the eerie orange site where...
Happily, this was a problem NASA had foreseen. In J.P.L.'s so-called sandbox, a roomful of Mars-like rock and soil with a mock-up lander and rover, the engineers had rehearsed a fairly straightforward maneuver that called for Pathfinder to raise one petal, tilting the entire craft 45[degrees], retract the deflated bag further and then lower the petal. The signal to execute the maneuver was sent up shortly before Earth set over the Martian horizon, breaking the communications link until dawn; just before the connection was actually severed, a picture came back confirming that the command...
...believers, the strange events at Roswell, N.M. [SOCIETY, June 23], represent the core of a vast panoply of beliefs in the same fashion that Christ does for Christians. Both claim to make sense out of senselessness. Videos of recent events and countless photos of wingless and bladeless craft, as well as the physical marks left on abductees, support the Roswell belief. DOUG PARRISH Howell, Mich...
...junk-shop proprietor Leo Wolfers is sweeping up a pile of window glass shattered by a mysterious sonic boom. Wolfers is used to the screaming fighter jets that take off from nearby Fallon Naval Air Station, but he says the plane that smashed his windows was no ordinary craft. "It was diamond shaped. It could rise straight up and hover. One of those planes they aren't allowed to talk about. Their pilots crash into mountains all the time, but the Navy just covers it up. It's all hush-hush." A hundred miles east in ("The Loneliest Town...
...like a post-modern plant stand than a space vehicle, spent ten hours studying a nondescript rock dubbed "Barnacle Bill" by scientists, in order to determine its composition. A neighboring rock nicknamed "Yogi" is next. Once Sojourner receives the steering signals broadcast by NASA late Monday, the scrappy little craft will amble over to the new rock at a speedy clip of one centimeter per second, studying soil characteristics along the way. NASA has yet to release any detailed information from Sojourner's chemical analyses, beyond a few hints about indications of past life on the Red Planet...