The Mars Pathfinder probe dropped on to Mars inside a bundle of balloons. The balloons bounced away from the falling parachute, deflated, and then the Sojourner rover slowly drove away over them.
Who drove a vehicle on Mars?
The Mars Pathfinder (1997) had a small, six-wheeled rover, called Sojourner. It used a camera and laser beams to find its way. Scientists on Earth asked Sojourner to examine particular objects, by radio. But the robot car had to decide how to reach them.
Is it true? There is life on Mars.
No. probes have tested Martian soil for life. They added food to the soil to see if there was anything living there that was hungry! There wasn’t. Then scientists found what looked like fossils inside a rock from Mars. After careful checking, they decided that the shapes were probably odd looking crystals. So there is no life on Mars, unless it is very good at hiding from us!
Amazing! For 20 years before Pathfinder, several probes sent to Mars ended in disaster. Sixteen probes from Russia either exploded on launch, missed the planet, or crashed into its surface. The American probe Observer exploded as it entered Mars’s orbit. Some probes just went missing. Nobody knows why.
Did Vikings really land on Mars?
Two space probes, called Viking 1 and Viking 2, landed on Mars in the 1970s. They took 3,000 photos, some in 3-D, and beamed them back to Earth. The Viking probes also measured weather patterns and examined the soil for signs of life. They didn’t find any aliens.
