The Mars Pathfinder mission was widely proclaimed as "flawless" in the early days after its July 4th, 1997 landing on the
Martian surface. Successes included its unconventional "landing" bouncing onto the Martian surface surrounded by
airbags, deploying the Sojourner rover, and gathering and transmitting voluminous data back to Earth, including the
panoramic pictures that were such a hit on the Web. But a few days into the mission, not long after Pathfinder started
gathering meteorological data, the spacecraft began experiencing total system resets, each resulting in losses of data.
The press reported these failures in terms such as "software glitches" and "the computer was trying to do too many things at
once".