Just 24 hours away from landing on the surface of Mars, NASA's Mars Pathfinder spacecraft remains in excellent health and is on target for a 10:07 a.m. Pacific Daylight Time landing tomorrow on the red planet.
Currently the spacecraft is about 450,000 kilometers (280,000 miles) away from Mars, traveling at a velocity of about 19,300 kilometers per hour (12,000 miles per hour) with respect to Mars. The spacecraft passed into the sphere of Mars' gravitational influence at about 4 a.m. PDT today.
The flight team will have two opportunities to perform a final flight path maneuver before landing. They may carry out the maneuver either 12 hours or six hours before Pathfinder enters the upper atmosphere of Mars at 10 a.m. PDT on July 4th. If performed, the maneuver would insure that the spacecraft lands as near to the center of a 60-mile by 120-mile elliptical landing site as possible. The team will determine whether this correction maneuver is necessary later this evening.
At a morning press briefing, scientists revealed a black- and-white approach photograph of Mars taken on July 2 by NASA's Mars Global Surveyor spacecraft at a distance of 10.5 million kilometers (6.5 million miles). The Global Surveyor is an orbiter that will arrive at Mars on September 12, 1997.
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This image is the first view of Mars taken by the Mars Orbiter Camera (MOC) science instrument onboard the Surveyor spacecraft. The photograph was acquired the afternoon of 2 July 1997 when Surveyor was 17.2 million kilometers (10.7 million miles) and 72 prior to arrival at Mars. At this distance, the MOC's resolution is about 64 km per picture element, and the 6,800 km (4,200 mile) diameter planet is 105 pixels across. The observation was designed to show the Mars Pathfinder landing site (19.4N, 33.1W) approximately 48 hours prior to landing. The image shows the north polar cap of Mars at the top of the image, the dark feature Acidalia Planitia in the center with the brighter Chryse plain immediately beneath it, and the highland areas along the Martian equator including the canyons of the Valles Marineris (which are bright in this image owing to atmospheric dust). The dark features Terra Meridiani and Terra Sabaea can be seen at the 4 o'clock position, and the south polar hood (atmospheric fog and hazes) can be seen at the bottom of the image. |
The photograph, when compared with recent Hubble Space Telescope images of Mars, indicated that a local dust storm sweeping through Vallis Marineris in the southern hemisphere of Mars would not reach the Pathfinder landing site because the atmosphere remains very cold, indicating no increase in surface wind activity. Scientists predict the temperature on Mars at landing will be about minus 84 degrees Celsius (minus 119 degrees Fahrenheit).
For more information, please visit our website at http://mpfwww.jpl.nasa.gov.