Word: rovers
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...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 away from the lander and investigate rocks all over the desert-like site...
...touchdown was not without problems. Early pictures revealed that one of the airbags that cushioned the craft during its descent had bunched up in a way that hindered the rover from leaving the lander. In addition, the computer aboard Sojourner and the one aboard Pathfinder were having trouble communicating with each other, which prevented the rover from getting the information it needed to rove beyond the immediate vicinity of the lander. But these problems, which engineers promptly set about fixing, did little to dampen the excitement when Pathfinder sent back its stunning panoramas of the eerie orange site where...
...J.P.L., the scientists did what scientists do in such signal moments, responding with both exultant overstatement and near-surreal understatement. "This is a spectacular day," said mission manager Richard Cook. Rover scientist Henry Moore agreed, after a fashion. "Nobody," he said, without a trace of obvious irony, "has ever driven a car on Mars before...
...rover will not operate for long--no more than a month--before Mars' punishingly cold climate (-15[degrees]F by day but plunging as low as -125[degrees]F at night) kills it. The Pathfinder lander, also able to take readings, could function for up to a year. No matter when the machines wink out, however, Mars is unlikely to remain unattended. On Sept. 12, Global Surveyor, another robot probe, will arrive at the planet, settle into a 250-mile-high orbit and begin two years of mapping the surface. A second lander-and-orbiter pair...
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...