Word: lander
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...undisputed star of the week, however, surpassing even the rocks, was the 25-lb. Sojourner, which Rob Manning, Pathfinder's flight-systems chief engineer, dubbed "The Little Rover That Could." Having inched its way down the steeply inclined lander ramp, the six-wheeled Sojourner crept gingerly onto the Martian surface early last week and, in its first official scientific experiment, shoved the nose of its X-ray spectrometer into the dust at the foot of the lander...
Sojourner next turned toward Barnacle Bill, a 10-in.-high rock lying within arm's length of the lander, and closed in to sniff out its mineral content. Displaying a picture of the rover at the rock, the ever buoyant project scientist Matthew Golombek joked, "Here we have proof that Sojourner sort of nestled up and kissed Barnacle Bill." The high-tech buss, profferred by the rover's X-ray spectrometer, produced an unexpected finding: the rock was apparently loaded with silicon or silicon dioxide, commonly known as quartz...
...groan swept across the operations room at the J.P.L., and pictures transmitted by the lander soon afterward showed Sojourner askew, leaning against Yogi and seemingly helpless. But a quick check of the rover's systems confirmed that it was in good health, and controllers had little doubt that they could restart Sojourner, back it off the rock and try a better approach...
...such luck. On Sol 6, NASA's designation for Pathfinder's sixth day on Mars, they transmitted the appropriate instructions to the lander, which was to relay them to Sojourner. But the Pathfinder team had inexplicably failed to awaken the lander, which is shut down every Martian night, and the message was not received. "One miscalculation cost us the whole evening," sighed J.P.L. deputy project manager Brian Muirhead. As a result, Sojourner remained incapacitated and unable to operate the next day. That led a rover team member to crack, "On the seventh day, it decided to rest...
Inside the lander, computer-driven devices measured the soil samples and fed them into the miniature biology lab, where they were analyzed for signs of growth, metabolism and respiration, processes that would signal the presence of living microorganisms. In one of the tests, a soil sample dampened with "chicken soup"--a nutrient broth--gave off a burst of oxygen. In another, unexpectedly large amounts of carbon dioxide and carbon monoxide were released. While both results produced flurries of excitement at J.P.L., scientists eventually--though reluctantly--concluded that the gases resulted not from life processes, but from some exotic Martian chemistry...