Mars Pathfinder engineers reported a day of flawless operations of the lander and Sojourner Rover on Mars with the end of the mission's 13th day on Mars this morning, and also noted that they have found and are in the process of fixing a software bug that had caused the lander's computer to reset itself four times in recent days.

"The resets on the lander computer were caused by a software task that was unable to complete the task in the allotted time," said Flight Director Brian Muirhead. "We found that the task was being cut short because it had not been given high enough priority to run through to completion. Basically, we just need to add one instruction to the computer software to raise the priority of that task."

The problem was reproduced and isolated in testing at JPL. Further tests and verification will be completed today and tomorrow, with radio transmission of a software "patch" to change the lander's software scheduled for Saturday, Muirhead said.

Overnight, the Pathfinder team received all of the planned 58 megabits of data expected from the lander, along with the first of eight image sectors that will be combined to create a so-called "super-pan" high-resolution color panorama of the Martian terrain surrounding the spacecraft. The rest of the images will be transmitted back to Earth over the next several days.

A new "rover movie" created from time-lapse images taken by the lander was returned overnight. It shows Sojourner moving 2.5 meters (about 8 feet) and closing in on the whitish rock dubbed Scooby Doo. During the next Martian day, Sol 14, Rover drivers at JPL will bring the vehicle closer to the rock so Sojourner's alpha proton X-ray spectrometer can be placed against the rock.

On this Martian Day, Sol 13, Earth rise was at 5:27 p.m. yesterday, sunrise was at 9:35 p.m., Earth set was at 7:06 a.m. and sunset was at 9:33 a.m.

For more information, please visit our website at http://mpfwww.jpl.nasa.gov.