Word: shipped
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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...
Whether the ship would continue to exceed expectations would not be known until later in the day, 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...
That home run turned into a grand slam a few hours later when the Pathfinder team convened a press conference to unveil the panoramic color images the ship had beamed home. The pictures revealed the Marsscape with a richness and resolution the black-and-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...
More, indeed. Though Pathfinder and Surveyor will be claiming the attention of Mars scientists for the immediate future, there's a small fleet of similar ships poised to fly. Every 26 months the orbital minuet that Earth and Mars dance around the sun brings them close enough to make interplanetary travel practical. NASA plans to take advantage of those exploratory windows, sending at least three other lander-orbiter pairs to the Red Planet in 1998, 2001 and 2003. In 2005 the agency hopes to exceed even these ambitious plans, launching the first-ever round-trip Mars ship, one capable...
Still another spacecraft might be launched to fly by Europa and drop a 20-lb. sphere onto its surface. Striking the frozen crust with the force of a suitcase full of TNT, the cosmic cannonball would release a mushroom cloud of ice particles into space; the mother ship would then fly through the crystalline mist, collect a bit of it and carry it back to Earth for analysis...