Watch: 25 years ago, NASA's first rover rolled down onto the Martian surface

NASA's Pathfinder mission landed on Mars a quarter century ago, delivering a lander and the first-ever robotic rover, Sojourner, to the surface of the Red Planet.

Both the lander and rover outlived their design lives. The microwave oven-sized rover spent 83 days of a planned seven-day mission exploring the Martian terrain, snapping photographs and taking chemical, atmospheric and other measurements.

Watch NASA’s Sojourner rover exploring the Martian surface in this video.

Looking back at Pathfinder 25 years later: A daring team of engineers forever changed how we explore when they put our first Mars rover, Sojourner, on the Red Planet. https://t.co/zq2RYY823d pic.twitter.com/WgKRTQgvys

— NASA Mars (@NASAMars) July 27, 2022

While Mars Pathfinder was designed primarily to demonstrate a low-cost way of delivering a set of science instruments and a free-ranging rover to the Martian surface, the mission returned an unprecedented amount of data and outlived its primary design life. According to NASA, the mission returned 2.3 billion bits of information, including more than 16,500 images from the lander and 550 images from the rover, as well as more than 15 chemical analyses of rocks and soil and extensive data on winds and other weather factors.

Overall, the mission was a great success and served as the foundation for today's Mars rovers. 25 years later, NASA is preparing to return Mars samples collected by its Perseverance rover to Earth for detailed analysis.

"With every new mission and every new way of exploring Mars, humanity gains a better understanding of how the Red Planet once resembled Earth, covered by rivers and lakes and featuring the chemistry needed to support life," NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory said in a statement.