Why was the Mars Pathfinder project important?
The Pathfinder project was conducted by the U.S. National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) to characterize the Martian environment for further exploration. On July 4, 1997, the Pathfinder lander (a vehicle launched into space) touched down on Mars, then deployed a two-foot (61-centimeter) -long robotic rover—a remote-controlled data-gathering machine—called Sojourner. By September 27, however, NASA had lost contact with Pathfinder, and on November 5 officials announced that the mission was terminated. They speculated that a dead battery in the lander and cold temperatures on Mars may have contributed to the loss of communication, but the exact cause was not known. Nevertheless, the Pathfinder project was not a complete failure because Sojourner yielded a tremendous amount of data. The rover collected 2,300,000,000 bits of information about the…
