After the Viking probes tasked with finding signs of life on Mars in 1976, in 1996 NASA launched the Mars Pathfinder mission which carried the first mobile robot capable of analysing the surface of the red planet. On 4 July 1997, the Sojourner rover began to send back images from the surface of Mars which could be viewed live on the Internet. A fully-fledged technology test for future missions to Mars, Sojourner transmitted observations and conducted soil tests for 83 days covering a distance of 102 metres. All contact was lost on 27 September 1997.