A 8:
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Again, it was driving off the Lander and onto the surface. I remember
that very clearly because there was a bit of uncertainty as to what
happened. The images that came back didn't show the Rover in the field of
view, and I had a moment of panic wondering what had happened to the Rover,
wondering if it had driven off in the wrong direction or fliped over. But we
were actually taking a series of images, and one of the first Rover movies we
took showed the Rover driving down the ramp. And in the next frame I saw
the Rover slowly coming down the ramp, and I was just ecstatic knowing we
that we could now start to drive. Everyone burst into applause, and we were
doing high fives and stuff.
The other highlights for me were being able to explore areas that were not
visible from the Lander cameras. There was a time we went behind a hill and
could explore what was behind it, and after a while, we got so that we were
very familiar with the terrain, as if we were there ourselves. The
mysteries that were left were the things that we couldn't see from the
static viewpoint of the Lander, and that's where the Rover shined. We could
go around hills, and eventually wanted to go off quite a ways from the
Lander, but with our loss of communications, that didn't come to pass.
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