Science Experiments
The Mars Pathfinder conducted different investigations on the Martian soil using three scientific instruments. The lander contained a stereoscopic camera with spatial filters on an expandable pole called Imager for Mars Pathfinder (IMP), and the Atmospheric Structure Instrument/Meteorology Package (ASI/MET) which acts as a Mars meteorological station, collecting data about pressure, temperature, and winds. The MET structure included three windsocks mounted at three heights on a pole, the topmost at about one meter (yard) and generally registered winds from the West.
The Sojourner rover had an Alpha Proton X-ray Spectrometer (APXS), which was used to analyze the components of the rocks and soil. The rover also had two black-and-white cameras and a color one. These instruments could investigate the geology of the Martian surface from just a few millimeters to many hundreds of meters, the geochemistry and evolutionary history of the rocks and surface, the magnetic and mechanical properties of the land, as well as the magnetic properties of the dust, atmosphere and the rotational and orbital dynamics of the planet.
Three cameras were onboard of the rover: Two black and white 0.3-megapixel cameras were located on the front (768 horizontal pixels × 484 vertical pixels configured in 4×4 pixel blocks), coupled with five laser stripe projectors, which enabled stereoscopic images to be taken along with measurements for hazard detection on the rover's path. A third camera with the same resolution but taking colour images was located on the back, near the APXS, and rotated by 90°. It provided images of the APXS's target area and the rover's tracks on the ground. The pixels of this colour camera were arranged in such a way, that out of the 16 pixel of a 4×4 pixel block, 12 pixel were sensitive to green, 2 pixel to red and 2 pixel were sensitive to infrared as well as blue. As all cameras had lenses made out of zinc selenide, which blocks light below a wavelength of 500 nm, no blue light actually reached these "blue/infrared" pixels, which therefore recorded only infrared.
All three cameras were CCDs manufactured by Eastman Kodak Company, and were controlled by the rover's CPU. They all had auto-exposure and capabilities for handling bad pixels, and the image parameters (exposure time, compression used, etc.) were included in the transmitted images as part of the image header. The rover could compress the front cameras' images using the block truncation coding (BTC) algorithm, but it could only do the same for the back camera's images only if the colour information was discarded. The cameras' optical resolution was sufficient to resolve 0.6 cm details across a 0.65 m range.
Read more about this topic: Mars Pathfinder
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