Word: martianize
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Barnacle Bill. Yogi. Casper. Scooby Doo. Flat Top, Boo-Boo. The Couch. Souffle. After billions of years of anonymity, a motley collection of rocks on the Martian flood plain called Ares Vallis at last had names of their own. And back on Earth last week, the Pathfinder scientists who had playfully nicknamed the rocks were enjoying, as one of them phrased it, "a rock festival," reveling in the torrent of data being yielded by the rock stars and their surroundings...
...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...
After bombarding the reddish dirt with helium nuclei and analyzing the resulting patterns of radiation, the spectrometer revealed that the soil was rich in iron and virtually identical to that examined at other sites 21 years earlier by the Viking landers. This suggested to scientists that Martian topsoil is widely distributed by the planet's frequent global dust storms. Why the reddish hue? "The surface of Mars is rusting," explains Jim Bell, a Cornell University scientist...
Sojourner also managed to obtain a "fingerprint" of the other chemicals in Barnacle Bill. The fingerprint turned out to be virtually identical to those of the 12 meteorites found on Earth that are believed to have Martian origins. "So," concluded University of Tennessee scientist Hap McSween after the visit to Barnacle Bill, "now we can say that we have analyzed 13 Martian rocks...
...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...