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Mars Pathfinder Update - July 3, 1997

PUBLIC INFORMATION OFFICE
JET PROPULSION LABORATORY
CALIFORNIA INSTITUTE OF TECHNOLOGY
NATIONAL AERONAUTICS AND SPACE ADMINISTRATION
PASADENA, CALIF. 91109. TELEPHONE (818) 354-5011
http://www.jpl.nasa.gov

            MARS PATHFINDER MISSION STATUS
                    July 3, 1997

     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. 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).     

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