CBG - Mars Pathfinder Mission, der Rover und seine Aufgaben

THE ROVER AND HIS TASKS ON THE SURFACE !

"We are looking for different rocks so we can get a better idea of Mars' total composition," said mission scientist Matthew Golombek at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory here. "We have lots of different rocks on earth and we would expect to find the same thing on Mars," he said.

"Yogi," named after the cartoon character Yogi Bear because of what some scientists call its bear-like appearance, will be the second martian rock that the little six-wheeled buggy has probed following the Pathfinder spacecraft's landing in the Ares Vallis basin of Mars last Friday. Its first target, the pockmarked-looking "Barnacle Bill", yielded a stream of information which surprised scientists by showing that Mars, far from being alien, is instead a lot like Earth.

In the quest to expand the available data, the rover will also be sent to two other nearby rocks, "Casper" and "Scoobie Doo" -- also dubbed after cartoon characters -- to examine them with its alpha proton X-ray spectrometer.
"From what we can see from the photographs, this is a totally different rock (from "Barnacle Bill") and probably with a somewhat different composition," Golombek said.

The Sojourner had been originally scheduled to scan "Yogi" shortly after its landing, but photographs from the lander craft showed the front of the rock sitting in a hollow, perhaps formed when it was deposited there, either by a flood or being blasted from a nearby volcanic eruption millions or billions of years ago.
So the Sojourner spent much of Tuesday taking high resolution, close-up pictures of "Yogi" to determine where it should place its spectrometer against the rock, where it would bombard the surface with protons.
This, explained Golombek at a media briefing, could mean that if the rover was to venture to that part of the rock it might slide into the hollow and bump its solar panels against the rock, depriving its batteries of valuable energy from the sun.

The rover turns back to the site where it had landed. The Pathfinder sits comfortably on a small hill nearby. Its solar paddles are still generating energy by collecting sun light. One can see the airbags hiding underneath the paddles. The rocks which where already examined by the rover and the vehicles´traces in the dusty surface of Mars are visible in the foreground.
In total, Pathfinder returned 1.2 gigabits of data and nearly 10,000 pictures of the Martian landscape with its highly sensitive antenna. After 30 days the rover is still healthy and has clocked 171 feet, circumnavigated the lander and taken 384 views of rocks and the lander.
The rover´s next task is to climb a hill in its vicinity which is located in a distance of approximately 100 yards. This hill is almost 70 feet high. This expedition will take the vehicle nearly one month. The position on top of the hill will provide a wide range of photographs of the surface of Mars from a different perspective.

Sojourner stopped and waited patiently for instruction. With her front wheel on the rock Torres and rear wheel on Tigger.
This caused her further motion toward the rock Shark to be stopped, as provided for in the rover software. Rover engineers are considering a change in the value of this articulation hazard parameter to allow Sojourner freer motion in the challenging terrain of the Rock Garden.

That is because they have restricted themselves to two sessions daily of sending commands and downloading data from the spacecraft, mostly late at night and early morning Pacific daylight time, when the sun is shining on Sojourner and sending power to its solar cells. It takes about 10 minutes, 25 seconds for a signal to travel between the two planets.

Informations were scanned by the spectrometer.

The first informations about the vulcanoes on the surface reached the scientists. Olympus Mons is the largest among them. This shield vulcano, similar to vulcanoes on Hawaii, measures 374 miles in diameter by 16 miles high. It is 100 times larger than Mauna Loa on Earth. The caldera in the center is 50 miles wide and contains multiple circular, overlapping collapse crares created by different volcanic events.

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Pathfinder Mission to Mars

		"Yogi," named after the cartoon character Yogi Bear because of what some scientists call its bear-like appearance, will be the second martian rock that the little six-wheeled buggy has probed following the Pathfinder spacecraft's landing in the Ares Vallis basin of Mars last Friday. Its first target, the pockmarked-looking "Barnacle Bill", yielded a stream of information which surprised scientists by showing that Mars, far from being alien, is instead a lot like Earth.
		In the quest to expand the available data, the rover will also be sent to two other nearby rocks, "Casper" and "Scoobie Doo" -- also dubbed after cartoon characters -- to examine them with its alpha proton X-ray spectrometer. "From what we can see from the photographs, this is a totally different rock (from "Barnacle Bill") and probably with a somewhat different composition," Golombek said.
		The Sojourner had been originally scheduled to scan "Yogi" shortly after its landing, but photographs from the lander craft showed the front of the rock sitting in a hollow, perhaps formed when it was deposited there, either by a flood or being blasted from a nearby volcanic eruption millions or billions of years ago. So the Sojourner spent much of Tuesday taking high resolution, close-up pictures of "Yogi" to determine where it should place its spectrometer against the rock, where it would bombard the surface with protons. This, explained Golombek at a media briefing, could mean that if the rover was to venture to that part of the rock it might slide into the hollow and bump its solar panels against the rock, depriving its batteries of valuable energy from the sun.
		The rover turns back to the site where it had landed. The Pathfinder sits comfortably on a small hill nearby. Its solar paddles are still generating energy by collecting sun light. One can see the airbags hiding underneath the paddles. The rocks which where already examined by the rover and the vehicles´traces in the dusty surface of Mars are visible in the foreground. In total, Pathfinder returned 1.2 gigabits of data and nearly 10,000 pictures of the Martian landscape with its highly sensitive antenna. After 30 days the rover is still healthy and has clocked 171 feet, circumnavigated the lander and taken 384 views of rocks and the lander. The rover´s next task is to climb a hill in its vicinity which is located in a distance of approximately 100 yards. This hill is almost 70 feet high. This expedition will take the vehicle nearly one month. The position on top of the hill will provide a wide range of photographs of the surface of Mars from a different perspective.
		Sojourner stopped and waited patiently for instruction. With her front wheel on the rock Torres and rear wheel on Tigger. This caused her further motion toward the rock Shark to be stopped, as provided for in the rover software. Rover engineers are considering a change in the value of this articulation hazard parameter to allow Sojourner freer motion in the challenging terrain of the Rock Garden.