Country of Origin: United States
Dimensions:
Overall: 2in. x 11in. x 1ft 2in. (5.1 x 27.9 x 35.6cm)
Materials:
Metal, plastic, and eletronic components
The Mars Pathfinder possessed five separate antennas for cruise, landing, and surface operations during its 1997 mission. The most important of these was this high-gain antenna, providing continuous telecommunications from the lander on the Martian surface to Earth. This high-gain antenna included a mechanically-steered slotted plate with 2 degrees of freedom in pointing. It provided a nominal 125 bits per second (b/s) uplink rate and a telemetry downlink rate of approximately 600 b/s that could be monitored using the NASA Deep Space Network on Earth containing 34-meter and 70-meter dish antennas.
NASA transferred this to the Museum with the Pathfinder engineering model in 1999.
Transferred from Jet Propulsion Laboratory, California Institute of Technology
