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...first the J.P.L. controllers had no indication that the ship had survived this inelegant landing--and the engineers didn't expect one. The only antenna capable of transmitting through the ship's cocoon of balloons was a single, whiplike stalk protruding from between two of the bags. If Pathfinder landed upside down, however, the antenna would be crushed against the ground. It would then be at least two hours before the bags could deflate and one of three metal petals that make up the sides of the ship could open, turning the entire structure upright. Only then could a more...
...turned out, Pathfinder rolled to a stop in precisely the right position, with its base down and its antenna up. Inside mission control, Manning squinted at his monitor and saw that contact with the ship had been maintained. "A signal is barely visible," he announced with a grin. The controllers burst into cheers...
Preliminary readings from the ship indicated that landing conditions were well within what the engineers had expected. Pathfinder was tilted at an angle of less than 3[degrees], plenty flat enough to allow the rover to disembark. The solar arrays were being bathed by sun and were producing all the power the spacecraft needed. That same sun, however, was providing little heat: the temperature at Ares Vallis was a crisp -64[degrees]F. But Pathfinder, built to function in that kind of killing cold, seemed unaffected. "I'm ecstatic," said flight systems manager Brian Muirhead as the stream of healthy...
Whether the ship would continue to exceed expectations would not be known until later in the day, however, when the cameras on the lander were at last brought online. Before that could happen, the airbags had to deflate completely, and actuator motors, powerful enough to pull a small boulder, had to draw them under the ship. Then Pathfinder itself had to open up, exposing the Sojourner rover inside and sending back the first black-and-white pictures...
That home run turned into a grand slam a few hours later when the Pathfinder team convened a press conference to unveil the panoramic color images the ship had beamed home. The pictures revealed the Marsscape with a richness and resolution the black-and-white shots couldn't. But it also revealed the problem of the obstructing airbag. It was bad enough luck that one of the mounds of fabric was bunched up in front of a petal; far worse that it was the one petal that was supposed to allow the rover egress. "The great galactic ghoul...