Mars Pathfinder

Mars Pathfinder was a NASA mission that landed a base station and a small robotic rover on Mars in July 1997. It was the first successful landing on the Red Planet since the Viking missions in 1976. The mission consisted of a lander, renamed the Carl Sagan Memorial Station, and a 10.6-kilogram rover named Sojourner, which became the first rover to operate on another planet. Pathfinder demonstrated a new way of delivering payloads to the Martian surface using an innovative airbag landing system. Over its three-month mission, it returned thousands of images and chemical analyses of Martian rocks and soil, proving that the 'Faster, Better, Cheaper' approach to space exploration could yield significant scientific results.