For the past two days we have been having difficulty communicating with the Pathfinder spacecraft and Sojourner rover. Although we expected the spacecraft to communicate with us, we did not see the expected signal. Today we will attempt to understand the problem by using the Canberra Deep Space Network station to up link commands to Pathfinder that will cause it to send us a beacon signal from the low gain antenna.

We will also attempt to initialize the high gain antenna and send down engineering data that will help us diagnose the problem. Although we do not specifically know what is the problem, we believe it is associated with an expected degradation of the Pathfinder battery. It is possible that the lander is now operating only on solar power and we will need to adjust our operations to support this new condition.

Understanding how to do this and learning how to operate the lander in this new mode are our goals for the next few days.

For more information, please visit our website at http://mpfwww.jpl.nasa.gov. or call our Mission Status Report line at 1-800-391-6654.