19971776 Club
Pathfinder bounces to a stop on Mars; first American images from the surface in twenty-one years
Airbags, parachutes, and retrorockets deliver the probe to Ares Vallis; the lander sat silent through the Martian night before transmitting at sunrise.
For two decades, no spacecraft had successfully touched down on Mars since the Viking landers of 1976. On July 4, 1997, NASA's Pathfinder probe hit the Martian atmosphere and, in a four-minute sequence of parachutes, retrorockets, and airbags, bounced to a stop on an ancient flood plain called Ares Vallis. It had arrived at night and sat silent until sunrise, when it beamed home the first American images from the Martian surface in twenty-one years. The lander deployed its petals 87 minutes after landing, but Sojourner did not roll onto the surface until Sol 2, the following Martian day, becoming the first rover ever to operate beyond the Earth-Moon system…
