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Mars Pathfinder Mission Status
July 4, 1997
9:15 p.m. Pacific Time
The Mars Pathfinder imaging team tonight unveiled the first photograph of Ares Vallis, an ancient water channel that at one time in Mars' early history carried more than 1,000 times the amount of flowing water carried by the Amazon River today. The color panorama, which drew enthusiastic applause at a 6:30 p.m. press briefing, was taken by the lander's Imager for Mars Pathfinder camera -- called the "IMP" -- before the camera was deployed on its mast. The photograph revealed a rocky desert scape with numerous large boulders and mountains on the horizon.

The images were transmitted during Pathfinder's first high- gain antenna transmission, which began at 4:28 p.m. PDT today. Totaling about 120, the postage stamp-sized black-and-white frames also included close-up photographs of the lander petals with the rover sitting in its stowed position in the foreground. Closer examination showed that one of the airbags did not fully retract and had become draped slightly over the edge of the rover's petal.

The Pathfinder flight and rover teams decided to test a new command sequence that would pull the obstructed petal up about 45 degrees, further retract the airbag, then lay the petal down again. The team tested this command sequence before uplinking it to the spacecraft starting at about 7:08 p.m. PDT. Return images from that transmission will be used by the rover team to determine if the "petal move" sequence cleared the petal enough to allow for safe deployment of the rover ramps. Some of the images were not received during the next downlink session due to a problem with the Deep Space Network tracking station. The remaining images were scheduled to be retransmitted during the last transmission of the day, which was to begin at 10 p.m. PDT.

If ramp deployment is postponed, the flight team will perform this activity Saturday morning. The rover would then be ready to roll off its ramp and onto the surface of Mars by about 5 p.m. PDT July 5.

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