The future of Mars exploration

A tech demonstration at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory leads to a rethink of the upcoming Mars Environmental Survey mission (MESUR). A self-contained “rover” named Rocky IV convinces mission planners to include a similar rover on an upcoming Mars mission; although the rest of MESUR is eventually scrapped due to budget cuts, the one portion of it to be salvaged is the Mars Pathfinder lander, which will deliver the rover (later to be named Sojourner in a nationwide contest) to the Martian surface sometime in the late ’90s.