PUBLIC INFORMATION OFFICE
JET PROPULSION LABORATORY
CALIFORNIA INSTITUTE OF TECHNOLOGY
NATIONAL AERONAUTICS AND SPACE ADMINISTRATION
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http://www.jpl.nasa.gov

Mars Pathfinder Mission Status
January 3, 1997
Mission planners report that NASA's Mars Pathfinder remains in good health as they plan an adjustment of the spacecraft's flight path to be executed January 9.

The trajectory correction maneuver, originally scheduled to take place tonight, is one of four such flight path adjustments that will take place over the course of Pathfinder's journey to Mars. The maneuver was delayed to allow time for reprogramming of some of Pathfinder's attitude control software. Tests showed that the spacecraft would have obtained erroneous attitude estimates during the maneuver in response to readings from Pathfinder's Sun sensors.

Today, Pathfinder is about 8.2 million kilometers (about 5.1 million miles) from Earth and about 162 million kilometers (about 101 million miles) from Mars and traveling at about 32.4 kilometers per second (about 72,646 miles per hour). It will land on Mars on July 4.

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