A set of twenty 35mm color slides may be ordered through Finley-Holiday Films for $8.95. They can be reached at (800) 345-6707 or (562) 945-3325, and ask for "JPL37". Also, the slides are available as high-resolutions images below, which you can print out on your printer.
NASA's Mars Polar Lander spacecraft began its journey to Mars on January 3, 1999. Mars Polar Lander will touch down on Mars on December 3, 1999, in a unique region near the border of the south polar cap. The Lander carries a descent camera, an upward-looking lidar for observing clouds, and an integrated payload of scientific instruments designed to help scientists better understand the history of Mars' climate.Over the next decade, an international fleet of scientifically equipped robotic spacecraft will arrive at the Red Planet searching for answers to these questions and others. The data that will be returned by these spacecraft will tell us much about the forces that shape Mars' weather, now and in the past. A better understanding of the Mars climate will also help us to understand the environment in which life did-or did not-develop on Mars and thus about the potential for life elsewhere in the universe. The New Millennium Program's Deep Space 2 mission, which launched in January 1999, is sending two highly advanced miniature probes to Mars. Each probe weighs just 2.4 kg (5.3 lb.) and is encased in a protective shell (called an aeroshell), which is riding aboard Mars Polar Lander. The probes will be the first spacecraft ever to penetrate into the subsurface of another planet. Upon arrival just above the South Polar Region of Mars, the basketball-sized shells will be released from the main spacecraft and plummet through the atmosphere to impact the planet's surface at over 175 m/s (400 mph). The Mars Polar Lander mission is managed by the Jet Propulsion Laboratory; Lockheed Martin Astronautics in Denver, Colorado, is NASA's industrial partner in the mission. The New Millennium Program is sponsored by NASA's Offices of Space Science and Earth Science, and is managed for NASA by the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, a division of the California Institute of Technology, Pasadena, CA.
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