Word: rovere
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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Preliminary readings from the ship indicated that landing conditions were well within what the engineers had expected. Pathfinder was tilted at an angle of less than 3[degrees], plenty flat enough to allow the rover to disembark. The solar arrays were being bathed by sun and were producing all the power the spacecraft needed. That same sun, however, was providing little heat: the temperature at Ares Vallis was a crisp -64[degrees]F. But Pathfinder, built to function in that kind of killing cold, seemed unaffected. "I'm ecstatic," said flight systems manager Brian Muirhead as the stream of healthy...
...however, when the cameras on the lander were at last brought online. Before that could happen, the airbags had to deflate completely, and actuator motors, powerful enough to pull a small boulder, had to draw them under the ship. Then Pathfinder itself had to open up, exposing the Sojourner rover inside and sending back the first black-and-white pictures...
...white shots couldn't. But it also revealed the problem of the obstructing airbag. It was bad enough luck that one of the mounds of fabric was bunched up in front of a petal; far worse that it was the one petal that was supposed to allow the rover egress. "The great galactic ghoul had to get us somewhere," said Donna Shirley, J.P.L.'s Mars program manager and Sojourner's designer, "and apparently the ghoul has decided to pick on the rover...
Happily, this was a problem NASA had foreseen. In J.P.L.'s so-called sandbox, a roomful of Mars-like rock and soil with a mock-up lander and 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...
...communication glitch between the lander and the rover took longer to resolve, but by late Saturday engineers believed they had synchronized the two systems and were cautiously declaring that that problem too was licked. Simply because Sojourner was now able to take to the Martian plains, however, did not mean that the going would be anything but painstakingly slow. For all its anthropomorphic sweetness, the plucky rover is a rather dimwitted machine. Its route from rock to rock will be programmed for it by a controller at a J.P.L. console, those instructions will be relayed to it through the Pathfinder...