NASA’s first rover on Mars, Sojourner, is all set to be a part of a new mission of exploring a solution to permanent human presence on the Moon.

Sojourner first landed the Mars Pathfinder on July 4, 1997. It was also part of the “insurance panorama,” that was captured on the second Martian day on Mars. Although the image was designed as insurance against camera failure upon deployment, the camera deployment got successful.

Pinterest

reddit

Tumblr

Several weeks later, the insurance panorama was downlinked to the Earth. It contains some of the best quality image data because of the lossless data compression. It was captured using a relatively dust-free state of the camera and the associated lander/rover hardware on Sol 2.

It was a seven-days NASA’s mission to explore the Martian terrain. Sojourner spent 83 days during this mission and acquired images and other measurements like chemical composition and atmospheric composition.

Read more: 20 Most Amazing Moons in the Solar System

It received the final data transmission from Pathfinder at 10:23 UTC on September 27, 1997. Although the mission managers tried to restore communications during the following five months, they had to terminate it on March 10, 1998.

Now, NASA has confirmed that it would be working with U.S. companies and other international partners for a new project. In the upcoming mission, NASA will work towards building a permanent human presence on the Moon. They hope to achieve their goal within the next decade. And in the next phase of this mission, they would be exploring Mars for human presence.

Reference:

Mars Pathfinder and Sojourner https://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/mars-pathfinder