Hi. I'm Carla Haun. I work the night shift, 11 to 7, as a med tech in a hospital lab, and it turns out the night shift is the perfect shift for Mars. Everybody in the country was trying to get onto the NASA pages this weekend. At three in the morning on my lunch break, it's just me and the machines humming and a couple of other insomniacs, and the pictures come right up.

I'm keeping a log here, one entry for every Martian day (they call them "sols"). A sol is about 40 minutes longer than our day, so the Pathfinder people are slowly sliding onto a schedule where they sleep at noon. Welcome to my world, guys.

SOL 1  Friday, July 4, 1997
IT LANDED. A little after one o'clock in the afternoon our time. I set my alarm for noon so I could watch on TV, which on a work night is a real sacrifice. It came in straight from space, no orbiting first: heat shield, parachute, little rockets, and then they let it drop inside a big bunch of airbags and it BOUNCED across the ground like a beach ball until it rolled to a stop. Then the airbags pulled in and the petals opened like a flower. When the first signal came back that it was alive, the whole control room went crazy, and so did I, alone in my living room in my bathrobe. By evening they had pictures up: the rover still folded down on its petal, the airbags, and rocks. Rocks everywhere. It's the first time we've landed anything on Mars since the Vikings in 1976. I was a junior in high school then.

SOL 2  Saturday, July 5
A snag. One of the airbags didn't pull in all the way and it was bunched up where the rover's ramp needed to go, so they had to lift a petal and reel the airbag in some more. There was also some trouble with the radio link between the rover and the lander. They fixed both. Late Saturday night, California time, Sojourner drove down the ramp and put all six wheels on Mars. I was in the middle of a stack of blood counts. Heard it at my 5 a.m. break. I did a little dance in the break room and our phlebotomist asked if I was OK. Also, they've named the lander the Carl Sagan Memorial Station. He'd have loved this.

SOL 3  Sunday, July 6
Sojourner backed up to a rock they call Barnacle Bill and pressed its instrument against it. That's the APXS, the alpha proton X-ray spectrometer (I had to look that up three times), and it reads what the rock is made of. It sits there overnight collecting. I know that feeling. I have analyzers that do the same thing.

SOL 4  Monday, July 7
More pictures. The science team has been naming rocks after cartoon characters: Yogi, Scooby Doo, Casper. Two little hills off on the horizon are the Twin Peaks. The sky is a sort of butterscotch pink, not blue, from the dust. I printed the big panorama on four sheets and taped it up in the lab. Our pathologist stopped and stared at it for five whole minutes, which is a record.

SOL 5  Tuesday, July 8
Sojourner is working its way over to Yogi, the big rock. It is not fast. It goes about two feet a minute, and it takes about ten minutes for a signal to get from California to Mars, so nobody can drive it like a toy car. They plan the moves, send them up, and the rover does them on its own and steers around trouble. Still waiting on the Barnacle Bill results. SOL 6 tomorrow morning after my shift!

THE MISSION IN A NUTSHELL

• Launched December 4, 1996, from Cape Canaveral on a Delta II rocket. Seven months to Mars.
• Landed July 4, 1997, in Ares Vallis, an old flood channel. The idea is that a flood long ago washed rocks down from all over, so there's a lot of variety in one spot.
• The rover, Sojourner, is about two feet long, has six wheels and a solar panel on top, and weighs about 23 pounds on Earth.
• It was named for Sojourner Truth, in a contest for students. The winning essay was by a 12-year-old girl from Connecticut.
• The plan: the rover was built to work for 7 sols and the lander for 30. Anything past that is gravy.
• Mars Global Surveyor is on its way too and gets into orbit in September.

COMING SOON
• SOL 6 and on, every morning after work
• My 3-D gallery. The lander's camera has two eyes, so they're putting out pictures you look at with red and blue glasses. I made my glasses out of red and blue cellophane and a cereal box. Directions coming, with the ones I like best
• Barnacle Bill: what's it made of?
• My scrapbook of Plain Dealer front pages