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Mars Pathfinder Update - September 23, 1997

MARS PATHFINDER MISSION STATUS
23 September 1997, 11:30 p.m. PDT

The spacecraft and rover are both in good health today
and successfully completed their activities. We did not
resolve the signal strength problem from yesterday's 
downlink in which the spacecraft signal strength was not as
high as expected during the final minutes of the
transmission session. In fact, the same problem was
observed today. We will continue to investigate the cause
of this problem. Fortunately, today we received nearly
all of the expected data despite this problem. This
included about six megabits of science data consisting
primarily of super resolution images.

The Earth rose this morning on Mars at 2:45 p.m. and the
Sun rose at 5:15 p.m. Pacific Daylight Time. Today the
rover team made some necessary changes to the rover's
on-board contingency sequence. In addition, Sojourner
continued to take APXS measurements on the rock "Chimp".

Earth set on Mars at 3:30 a.m. and the Sun will set 5:15
a.m. PDT on September 24th. The spacecraft will sleep for
nearly 16 hours tonight and will wake up tomorrow morning
around 3:00 p.m. PST . We should receive data from the
deep space network tomorrow starting around 10:00 p.m.
PDT .

Tomorrow's planned activities are for the rover to start
off towards Mermaid Dune and for the lander to continue
with its super resolution imaging . We also plan to continue
to take ASI/MET weather data.

For further information on the Mars Pathfinder Mission,
please call our Mission Status Report line at
1-800-391-6654.