January 9, 1999

By the winter of 1999, Clinton was in the White House and the federal minimum wage stood at $5.15/hr — the United States was simultaneously navigating a fragile peace effort in Kosovo as international pressure mounted on Serbian forces to stand down. On television, Americans were tuning into "ER" for their weekly drama fix, while at bookstores, John Grisham's "The Testament" was the fiction title moving fastest off the shelves. On the sports side, the San Antonio Spurs had claimed the NBA championship over the New York Knicks, the same winter that NASA launched the Mars Polar Lander on January 3, sending a spacecraft on a direct course for the Martian south pole in one of the agency's most ambitious planetary missions to date.