NASA launched the Mars Pathfinder mission
On this day · 4 December 1996
A cut-price NASA mission bounced onto Mars on airbags and set the first wheeled robot rolling across another world.
On 4 December 1996, NASA launched Mars Pathfinder aboard a Delta II rocket from Cape Canaveral, Florida. The mission aimed to prove that landing on Mars could be done cheaply and quickly after the costly Viking probes two decades earlier.
Rather than firing rockets all the way to the surface, Pathfinder slowed with a parachute, then bounced to a stop on a cocoon of inflated airbags on 4 July 1997. Out rolled Sojourner, a microwave-oven-sized rover weighing just 23 pounds.
It was the first wheeled vehicle ever to operate on another planet.
Sojourner crept across the rocky plain of Ares Vallis, sniffing rocks with its onboard spectrometer. Designed to last a week, it kept working for 83 days, never straying more than a dozen metres from the lander. The mission’s images and low cost helped usher in a new era of robotic Mars exploration that led directly to later rovers.
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