NASA's Rover mission: Magnificent 7 years on the Planet Mars

While NASA's Spirit rover is frozen in place on Mars and potentially dead to the world, the Opportunity rover is hale and hearty as it begins its eighth year of operation on the Red Planet.
"Seven years is a long time, but we're all delighting in it," John Callas, project manager for the rover missions at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, told me today.

History:


NASA's Mars Exploration Rover Mission (MER) is an ongoing robotic space mission involving two rovers, Spirit and Opportunity, exploring the planet Mars. It began in 2003 with the sending of the two rovers — MER-A Spirit and MER-B Opportunity — to explore the Martian surface and geology.

Objectives of Rover Mission on Mars:

The scientific objectives of the Mars Exploration Rover mission are to:^[7]

• Search for and characterize a variety of rocks and soils that hold clues to past water activity. In particular, samples sought include those that have minerals deposited by water-related processes such as precipitation, evaporation, sedimentary cementation, or hydrothermal activity.
• Determine the distribution and composition of minerals, rocks, and soils surrounding the landing sites.
• Determine what geologic processes have shaped the local terrain and influenced the chemistry. Such processes could include water or wind erosion, sedimentation, hydrothermal mechanisms, volcanism, and cratering.
• Perform calibration and validation of surface observations made by Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter instruments. This will help determine the accuracy and effectiveness of various instruments that survey Martian geology from orbit.
• Search for iron-containing minerals, and to identify and quantify relative amounts of specific mineral types that contain water or were formed in water, such as iron-bearing carbonates.
• Characterize the mineralogy and textures of rocks and soils to determine the processes that created them.
• Search for geological clues to the environmental conditions that existed when liquid water was present.
• Assess whether those environments were conducive to life.

For more info: Mars Exploration Rover

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