Pathfinder was a spacecraft assembled by the Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) under the auspices of NASA. The first spacecraft to land on Mars in over 20 years, it set down rather roughly on July 4, 1997. Basically, Pathfinder landed by inflating a series of parachutes to slow its descent somewhat and then inflating airbags. In Mars' low gravity, Pathfinder must have bounced numerous times over quite a distance before coming to a halt. This saved considerable mass and complexity over thruster-based landing systems, but was a chancy and untested proposition. Pathfinder was largely a platform to test new technologies, although planetary scientists were intrigued by those results obtained.