Word: rovere
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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...
...People picture this as being like a radio-controlled car, which would be the way to go if we could do that," says Brian Cooper, who will be the one sending the commands that tell the rover where to go. "But with an 11-minute time delay, it doesn't work that...
...first place because the now dusty basin was once the largest known floodplain in the solar system. Water rushed into the valley at up to 170 m.p.h., carrying a giant spelunker's bag of rocks with it. Without venturing very far from where the lander set down, the rover could thus use its cameras and X-ray spectrometer to sample geology from all over the planet. Sojourner is scheduled to conduct these studies for up to a month, depending on how quickly the extreme temperatures (from -15[degrees]F by day to -125[degrees]F at night) at last claim...
...result has been immediately felt. Pathfinder cost $171 million to build, and its Sojourner rover only $25 million. The Global Surveyor orbiter, set to join them at Mars in the fall, carried a price tag of just $152 million. Other ships being developed have had their prices slashed similarly. On the whole, the average cost of a single unmanned spacecraft has plunged from $590 million between 1990 and '94 to $190 million today, and Goldin hopes to get even that pennywise figure down to only $77 million after the turn of the decade. "Because the spacecraft cost less," he says...