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In Focus

NASA's Mars Pathfinder space-craft is capturing far more data on the atmosphere, weather and geology of Mars than scientists had expected. In all, Pathfinder has returned about 1.2 gigabits (1.2 billion bits) of data and 9,699 pictures of the Martian landscape. A new portrait of the Martian environment has begun to emerge since Pathfinder and its small, 23-pound rover began to record weather patterns, atmospheric opacity and the chemical composition of rocks washed down into the Ares Vallis flood plain.

"We are seeing much more differentiation of volcanic materials than we expected to see,' says Matthew Golombek, a scientist with the Mars Pathfinder project at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL). He says that data from Pathfinder reveal that there was much more crustal activity

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