Mars Pathfinder Mission Status

21 February 1997


The spacecraft remains in excellent health and is currently about 25 million kilometers from Earth. No significant operational activities were conducted this week, and we have adopted a policy of unattended operations for most of our tracking sessions.

The DSN Radiometric Tiger Team reported the cause of the ~500 Range Unit bias seen in DSS 15 range data between TCM-1 and TCM-2 was caused by an incorrect value for the signal inversion parameter in the SRA configuration table. The error has been fixed and subseqent DSS 15 data looks good.

A set of improvements to the Flight System Testbed Ground Support Equipment Software have been completed which will allow higher fidelity testing of the EDL flight software. Robustness testing of the EDL software has now been started and will continue for the next two months.


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