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Spirit Opportunity: Nasa Robotic Space Mission Mars Rovers Mars Rovers Geology Martian Solar Days

NASA's Mars Exploration Rover (MER) mission involved two rovers, Spirit and Opportunity, that explored the surface of Mars beginning in 2004. Both rovers vastly exceeded their planned 90-sol missions, with Spirit active until 2010 and Opportunity active until 2018. The initial cost of the mission was $820 million and included several mission extensions. In 2007, dust storms threatened to disable the solar-powered rovers, but they were able to resume operations after the storms lifted. In 2009, Spirit became stuck but continued as a stationary science platform until contact was lost in 2010, over 25 times its planned mission duration.

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50 views1 page

Spirit Opportunity: Nasa Robotic Space Mission Mars Rovers Mars Rovers Geology Martian Solar Days

NASA's Mars Exploration Rover (MER) mission involved two rovers, Spirit and Opportunity, that explored the surface of Mars beginning in 2004. Both rovers vastly exceeded their planned 90-sol missions, with Spirit active until 2010 and Opportunity active until 2018. The initial cost of the mission was $820 million and included several mission extensions. In 2007, dust storms threatened to disable the solar-powered rovers, but they were able to resume operations after the storms lifted. In 2009, Spirit became stuck but continued as a stationary science platform until contact was lost in 2010, over 25 times its planned mission duration.

Uploaded by

Anurag Rana
Copyright
© © All Rights Reserved
We take content rights seriously. If you suspect this is your content, claim it here.
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Download as DOCX, PDF, TXT or read online on Scribd
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NASA's Mars Exploration Rover (MER) mission was a robotic space mission involving two Mars

rovers, Spirit and Opportunity exploring the planet Mars. It began in 2003 with the launch of the


two rovers to explore the Martian surface and geology; both landed on Mars at separate locations in
January 2004. Both rovers far outlived their planned missions of 90 Martian solar days: MER-
A Spirit was active until March 22, 2010,[1] while MER-B Opportunity was active until June 10, 2018.[2]

The total cost of building, launching, landing and operating the rovers on the surface for the initial
90-sol primary mission was US$820 million.[4] Each rover received five mission extensions, as they
continued to function past their initially planned duration. The fifth mission extension was granted in
October 2007, and ran to the end of 2009.[4][5] The total cost of the first four mission extensions was
$104 million, and the fifth mission extension cost at least $20 million.[4]
In July 2007, during the fourth mission extension, Martian dust storms blocked sunlight to the rovers
and threatened the ability of the craft to gather energy through their solar panels, causing engineers
to fear that one or both of them might be permanently disabled. However, the dust storms lifted,
allowing them to resume operations.[6]
On May 1, 2009, during its fifth mission extension, Spirit became stuck in soft soil.[7] After nearly nine
months of attempts to get the rover back on track, including using test rovers on Earth, NASA
announced on January 26, 2010 that Spirit was being retasked as a stationary science platform. This
mode would enable Spirit to assist scientists in ways that a mobile platform could not, such as
detecting "wobbles" in the planet's rotation that would indicate a liquid core.[8] The Jet Propulsion
Laboratory (JPL) lost contact with Spirit after last hearing from the rover on March 22, 2010, and
continued attempts to regain communications lasted until May 25, 2011, bringing the elapsed
mission time to 6 years 2 months 19 days, or over 25 times the original planned mission duration.[9]

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