Word: lander
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...Pathfinder survives its inelegant touchdown unscathed, NASA scientists will waste no time getting to work. After the spacecraft gets its bearings, they'll send it a signal causing it to open up, revealing the papoose-like Sojourner rover inside. A camera on the lander will snap a picture of both the car and the landscape, and by 6 p.m. on the West Coast, NASA hopes to release the image both to the press and on the Web mpfwww.jpl.nasa.gov/) After that, it will at last be time for Brian Cooper to take the wheel...
...slamming into the planet at 55 miles per hour, then bouncing like a basketball up to as much as 150 feet in the air until coming to rest. Still, controllers at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory were pleased. "It's been wonderfully dull," Flight Director Rob Manning said after the lander completed its seven-month journey. Whether the craft survived the impact intact was not immediately known, but NASA received radio signals from the Martian surface that suggested that it landed in the best position, with its base petal on the ground. Scientists were also happy that the lander came within...
PASADENA, Calif: After a lull of more than 20 years, NASA is poised to resume exploration of the Red Planet as the Mars Pathfinder spacecraft prepares for a July 4 touchdown. Making a whimsical entry, the half-ton lander will approach the surface at 1pm EST at about 55 miles per hour, whereupon a bubble pack will absorb the brunt of the impact, sending the lander bouncing like a basketball up to the height of a four-story building until it settles safely on the planet surface. A small rover named Sojourner (24.5 inches long by 18.7 inches wide) will...
...goes well with these flights, as many as four more pairs will follow at two-year intervals beginning in December 1998. Though the second lander will not be as mobile as Pathfinder, it will have an improved stereoscopic camera and a robotic shovel, allowing it to scoop up soil and conduct more detailed studies of its chemical composition. Unfortunately, none of these ships is designed to test for what captured the world's imagination last week: Martian life...
...canyons on its surface, 50 times deeper than our own Grand Canyon, where water obviously flowed. The question is, What happened? What sort of catastrophic event finished life on that planet?" The remote-controlled Soujourner rover, no bigger than a microwave oven, will roll out of the Pathfinder lander on six wheels and roam the planet inspecting rocks and weather for up to 30 days. The Smithsonian Institution in Washington plans to issue a daily Martian weather report...