Word: martian
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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From the surface of Mars--where the sky is salmon and Earth is a blue morning star--you probably would have noticed the spaceship coming. It may have been the noise the thing made that caught your attention; although the Martian atmosphere is spent and shredded, it's not too tenuous to carry sound. And it's certainly not too tenuous to make anything that tries to punch through it pay the price, causing the interloper to glow like a meteor as it plunged toward a touchdown somewhere on the ancient world. That you couldn't have missed...
...soil of the long-dry valley. But there was a planet more than 100 million miles away filled with people who were paying heed when it landed, appropriately enough, on July 4. For the first time in 21 years, a machine shot from Earth once again stirred up the Martian dust. More important, for the first time ever, it was going to be able to keep stirring it up well after it landed. Curled up inside Pathfinder like a mechanical kangaroo joey was Sojourner, a 1-ft.-tall, 2-ft.-long robot car, known as a rover, designed to trundle...
...drive through the Martian countryside should begin this Friday, July 4. At about 10 a.m. Pacific time, after a seven-month journey, NASA's Pathfinder spacecraft will deposit the robot car--dubbed Sojourner--on the Martian surface, marking the first time an American spacecraft has kicked up the Martian soil since the Viking landings in 1976. More important, it will be the first time that NASA has been able to move an unmanned vehicle from place to place on a foreign world. "I truly believe," says project scientist Matthew Golombek, "that Pathfinder will change our view of Mars...
Before the little rover can traverse the Martian surface, of course, it must reach the Martian surface, and that won't be easy. The 1,300-lb. spacecraft will slam into the planet's atmosphere at 16,300 m.p.h., ultimately causing it to experience deceleration forces of 20 Gs. The vehicle's cork-and-silicon aeroshell should absorb most of this body blow. Both a parachute and a retrorocket will slow its plunge, and an array of airbags will inflate to cushion the shock of landing. And finally, the spacecraft will simply drop to the surface, striking the ground like...
ARES VALLIS, Mars: Great truth often is found in the tiniest and most ordinary of details. If so, a blizzard of revelations may be raining down now that the Sojourner rover has rolled carefully down the Pathfinder ramp and begun poking around the Martian surface. On Monday, the rover, which looks more 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...