QUESTION:
If at any time, Pathfinder or Sojourner send back images of, say, an
artifact or something equally unusual, will those images be classified by
NASA and withheld from public viewing?
 
ANSWER from Jack Farmer on July 17, 1997:
Images or othere data collected by any NASA mission are in the Public domain
and available to everyone. I know this to be the case by first hand
experience and have not had any reason to suspect otherwise. In the past
there has usually been a proprietary period for the data lasting a few
months during which time the team who conceived and flew the mission had a
first crack at interpreting and publishing on the information. But with
Pathfinder, even that has gone away, and all available imaging data was
posted on the web as it became available. In my own case, within two hours
of the data arriving from Mars, I was downloading it on my home computer and
printing it out from the Pathfinder website. I believe this is the way of
the future, with a minimal proprietary period on images before they are
placed in the Public domain.