Today's significance: NASA's Sojourner rover arrived on Mars in 1997

While the United States celebrated the 244th Independence Day on July 4, NASA remembered the historic Mars Pathfinder mission. The Sojourner rover had arrived on the Martian Planet on July 4 back in 1997. The entire mission was designed to showcase a cheaper method to deliver a package of scientific instruments to the Red Planet. According to NASA, the mission now serves as the ‘foundation’ for Mar rovers till date. The Mars Pathfinder which was able to return 2.3 billion bits of information including over 16,500 photographs, had landed on the planet by the use of an airbag landing system and petal design.

The same landing method that was used more than two decades ago, has been put into place for the landing of various other rovers. The Sojourner rover was named after one of the pinnacles in the civil rights movement, Sojourner Truth. According to NASA, “both outlived their design lives” and the lander lived nearly three times the predicted lifespan while the rover by 12 times. However, the Mars Pathfinder mission completed its last successful transmission of the information at 6:23am EDT on September 27, 1997.

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NASA, “The lander, formally named the Carl Sagan Memorial Station following its successful touchdown, and the rover, named after civil rights pioneer Sojourner Truth, both outlived their design lives — the lander by nearly three times, and the rover by 12 times.”

“Mars Pathfinder returned 2.3 billion bits of information, including more than 16,500 images from the lander and 550 images from the rover, as well as more than 15 chemical analyses of rocks and soil and extensive data on winds and other weather factors,” it added.

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Green glow in Mars atmosphere

The curiosity of the Red Planet has lasted for a long time now leading to many outstanding discoveries. Global Scientists’ several years of a unique quest finally ended when the European Space Agency's Trace Gas Orbiter (TGO) detected glowing green oxygen in the atmosphere of Mars. This is ‘for the first time’ that this type of emission is spotted in planet other than Earth where the glowing oxygen can be seen on the poles because the energetic electrons from the space hit Earth’s upper atmosphere. The TGO has been orbiting Mars since October 2016 and this type of emission was predicted to exist in martian planet's atmosphere for nearly 40 years. On June 15, the scientists finally “found it”. 

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