Mars Pathfinder

Mars Pathfinder was an American robotic spacecraft that landed a base station with a roving probe on Mars in 1997. It consisted of a lander, renamed the Carl Sagan Memorial Station, and a lightweight, 10.6 kg (23 lb) wheeled robotic Mars rover named Sojourner, the first rover to operate outside the Earth–Moon system. The mission terminated in 1998. Launched on December 4, 1996, by NASA aboard a Delta II booster a month after the Mars Global Surveyor, it landed on July 4, 1997, on Mars's Ares Vallis. The region is called Chryse Planitia, a part of the Oxia Palus quadrangle. The lander carried a series of scientific instruments to analyze the Martian atmosphere, climate, and geology. Analysis of the rocks and soil was a key objective. It was the second project from NASA's Discovery Program, which promotes the use of low-cost spacecraft and frequent launches under the "cheaper, faster, and better" motto promoted by then-administrator Daniel Goldin. The mission was directed by the Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL), a division of the California Institute of Technology, responsible for NASA's Mars Exploration Program. The project manager was JPL's Tony Spear. This mission was the first of a series of missions to Mars that included rovers, and was the first successful lander since the two Vikings landed on Mars in 1976. Although the Soviet Union successfully sent rovers to the Moon as part of the Lunokhod program in the 1970s, its attempts to use rovers in its Mars program failed.