QUESTION: 
Do you have a back up plan if anything goes wrong?

ANSWER from David Mittman on March 25, 1997:
The Mars Pathfinder Flight Engineers and other Project personnel are
currently working on a series of plans which are designed to handle
various problems which might occur after we land on Mars. Here are a 
few of the plans we're working on:

Low Power -- What if we land on Mars and find that we aren't getting 
the amount of solar power that we expected? Perhaps the air is very 
dusty or we are tilted quite a bit. Perhaps it is windy and we have to 
use more of our power to keep ourselves warm. In this case we'll 
probably have to cut back on the amount of power we use to transmit 
data to Earth. The spacecraft may have to take fewer pictures of Mars.

Loss of Antenna -- Mars Pathfinder has two antennas to transmit its 
data back to Earth: a low-gain antenna which is easy to operate but 
very slow, and a high-gain antenna which is more difficult to operate 
but faster than the low-gain antenna. If we lose our high-gain 
antenna, we won't be able to get as many pictures and other 
information back to Earth.

No Battery -- If your car battery dies, you call an automobile club. 
If Mars Pathfinder's battery dies, we'll continue to operate on solar 
power only. That means that at night we'll have to go to sleep instead 
of taking pictures of nighttime stars. It also means that every night we
have to shut down our computer and lose any information that we've
stored in memory. We'll only be able to collect information that can 
be sent to Earth that same day.

Loss of Command -- What if we land on Mars and are never able to 
command the spacecraft. Perhaps the spacecraft's receive broke during
landing. The spacecraft will have a full set of activities to perform 
in case it never hears from Earth after landing.