![]() A course correction followed 10 days later. Later, the PAM-D upper stage fired to send the spacecraft into a heliocentric orbit on a trajectory to intercept Mars. The spacecraft was sent to an intermediate parking orbit around Earth (about 100 × 2,960 miles or 163 × 4,762 kilometers) at a 28.5-degree inclination. ![]() Spirit was launched first, at 17:58:47 UT June 10, 2003, from Cape Canaveral, Florida. The arm would place the instruments directly on the soil or rocks and activate the instruments. The plan was for the rovers to move from place to place, to perform geological investigations and to take photographs with mast-mounted cameras (about 5 feet or 1.5 meters off the ground) providing 360-degree stereoscopic views of the terrain.Ī suite of instruments (MB, APXS, the magnets, MI and RAT) was deployed on a robotic arm (known as the instrument deployment device or IDD). Spirit and Opportunity were sent to opposite sides of Mars to locations that were suspected of having been affected by liquid water in the past. Launched about a month apart in 2003, the twin rovers’ main scientific objective was to search for a range of rocks and soil types and then look for clues for past water activity on Mars.Įach rover is about the size of a golf cart and seven times heavier (about 405 pounds or 185 kilograms) than the Sojourner rover launched on the Mars Pathfinder to Mars mission in 1996. The Spirit and Opportunity rovers together represented NASA's Mars Exploration Rover Mission (MER), part of the Mars Exploration Program. May 25, 2011: NASA officially ends efforts to contact the rover In Depth: Spirit Credit: NASA Visualization Technology Applications and Development (VTAD) Alpha Particle X-ray Spectrometer (APXS)Ī 3D model of the twin Mars Exploration Rovers, Spirit and Opportunity. miniature thermal emission spectrometer (Mini-TES)ģ. The rover had been silent since March 2010. On May 25, 2011, NASA ended efforts to contact the marooned rover and declared its mission complete.The rover traveled 4.8 miles (7.73 kilometers) across the Martian plains.Described as a "wonderful workhorse"-Spirit operated for 6 years, 2 months, and 19 days, more than 25 times its original intended lifetime.Spirit uncovered strong evidence that Mars was once much wetter than it is now.NASA's Spirit rover-and it's twin Opportunity-studied the history of climate and water at sites on Mars where conditions may once have been favorable to life.
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