 |
 |
| This stereo image pair taken on the morning of Sol 80 (September 23) shows the Sojourner rover with its Alpha Proton X-ray Spectrometer (APXS) deployed against the rock "Chimp." On the left horizon is the rim of "Big Crater," 2.2 km away. |
 |
| This set of images shows the Pathfinder upper wind sock during two time periods on the morning of Sol 80 (September 23). The interval between frames within each sequence is seven seconds. There is no obvious movement of the sock, indicating little or no wind at this elevation (about 1 meter above the surface). At other times during the mission, deflections of this and two lower wind socks have been used to estimate characteristics of the wind speed boundary layer profile. |
MARS PATHFINDER MISSION STATUS
23 September 1997, 11:30 p.m. PDT
The spacecraft and rover are both in good health today and successfully completed their activities. We did not resolve the signal strength problem from yesterday's down link in which the spacecraft signal strength was not as high as expected during the final minutes of the transmission session. In fact, the same problem was observed today. We will continue to investigate the cause of this problem. Fortunately, today we received nearly all of the expected data despite this problem. This included about six megabits of science data consisting primarily of super resolution images.
The Earth rose this morning on Mars at 2:45 p.m. and the Sun rose at 5:15 p.m. Pacific Daylight Time. Today the rover team made some necessary changes to the rover's on-board contingency sequence. In addition, Sojourner continued to take APXS measurements on the rock "Chimp".
Earth set on Mars at 3:30 a.m. and the Sun will set 5:15 a.m. PDT on September 24th. The spacecraft will sleep for nearly 16 hours tonight and will wake up tomorrow morning around 3:00 p.m. PST . We should receive data from the deep space network tomorrow starting around 10:00 p.m. PDT .
Tomorrow's planned activities are for the rover to start off towards Mermaid Dune and for the lander to continue with its super resolution imaging . We also to continue to take ASI/MET weather data.