The mission carried a series of scientific instruments to analyze the Martian atmosphere, climate, and geology and the composition of its rocks and soil.

The mission was directed by the Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL), a division of the California Institute of Technology, responsible for NASA's Mars Exploration Program.

The MET structure included three windsocks mounted at three heights on a pole, the topmost at about one meter (3.3 ft) and generally registered winds from the West.

The two front-facing monochrome cameras served navigation purposes and were coupled with five laser stripe projectors for stereoscopic hazard detection.

It shared the resolution of the front cameras but was rotated 90 degrees to capture images of both the APXS target area and the rover's tracks.

Scientists chose it because they found it to be a relatively safe surface to land on and one that contained a wide variety of rocks deposited during a catastrophic flood.

After the landing, at 19°08′N 33°13′W / 19.13°N 33.22°W / 19.13; -33.22,[20] succeeded, the lander received the name The Carl Sagan Memorial Station in honor of the astronomer.

[21] (See also List of extraterrestrial memorials) Mars Pathfinder entered the Martian atmosphere and landed using an innovative system involving an entry capsule, a supersonic parachute, followed by solid rockets and large airbags to cushion the impact.

When the lander reached 1.6 km (5,200 ft) above the surface, a radar was used by the on-board computer to determine altitude and descent velocity.

Eighty-seven minutes after landing, the petals were deployed with Sojourner rover and the solar panels attached on the inside.

Once the data was received, the engineers realized that one of the airbags had not fully deflated and could be a problem for the forthcoming traverse of Sojourner's descent ramp.

As the next sols progressed it approached some rocks, which the scientists named "Barnacle Bill", "Yogi", and "Scooby-Doo", after famous cartoon characters.

The rover made measurements of the elements found in those rocks and in the martian soil, while the lander took pictures of the Sojourner and the surrounding terrain, in addition to making climate observations.

The APXS works by irradiating rocks and soil samples with alpha particles (helium nuclei, which consist of two protons and two neutrons).

[35] The mission was jeopardised by a concurrent software bug in the lander,[36] which had been found in preflight testing but was deemed a glitch and therefore given a low priority as it only occurred in certain unanticipated heavy-load conditions, and the focus was on verifying the entry and landing code.

The problem, which was reproduced and corrected from Earth using a laboratory duplicate thanks to the logging and debugging functionality enabled in the flight software, was due to computer resets caused by priority inversion.

[40] The lander sent more than 2.3 billion bits (287.5 megabytes) of information including 16,500 pictures and made 8.5 million measurements of the atmospheric pressure, temperature and wind speed.

[41] By taking multiple images of the sky at different distances from the Sun, scientists were able to determine that the size of the particles in the pink haze was about one micrometre in radius.

The color of some soils was similar to that of an iron oxyhydroxide phase which would support the theory of a warmer and wetter climate in the past.

Since the weakest magnet did not attract any soil, it was concluded that the airborne dust did not contain pure magnetite or just one type of maghemite.

[44] Using Doppler tracking and two-way ranging, scientists added earlier measurements from the Viking landers to determine that the non-hydrostatic component of the polar moment of inertia is due to the Tharsis bulge and that the interior is not melted.

[47][48] The name Sojourner was chosen for the Mars Pathfinder rover when 12-year old Valerie Ambroise, of Bridgeport, Connecticut, won a year-long, worldwide competition in which students up to 18 years old were invited to select a heroine and submit an essay about her historical accomplishments.

The students were asked to address in their essays how a planetary rover named for their heroine would translate these accomplishments to the Martian environment.

Initiated in March 1994 by The Planetary Society of Pasadena, California, in cooperation with NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL), the contest got under way with an announcement in the January 1995 issue of the National Science Teachers Association's magazine Science and Children, circulated to 20,000 teachers and schools across the nation.

Second runner-up was Adam Sheedy, 15, of Round Rock, Texas, who submitted the name of the late astronaut Judith Resnik, who perished in the 1986 Space Shuttle Challenger explosion.