Word: martian
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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...
When Pathfinder was closer than seven miles above the Martian hardscrabble and two minutes from landing, a 40-ft. parachute opened. Less than 1,000 ft. up, a swaddling of shock-absorbing airbags inflated. Immediately after that, a cluster of retrorockets fired for a quick 2-sec. burst, applying a final brake. The almost comically balloonlike ship then struck the surface at about 22 m.p.h., bounced as high as 50 ft. and finally came to rest somewhere in the 4.6 billion-year-old dust...
...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 had been executed. Though a portion of the bag still blocked part of the petal, there was probably enough room for Sojourner to slip...
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...