Spirit, mission designation MER-A (Mars Exploration Rover - A), is the first of the two rovers of NASA's Mars Exploration Rover Mission. It landed successfully on Mars on 04:35 Ground UTC on January 4, 2004, three weeks before its twin Opportunity (MER-B) landed on the other side of the planet. Its name was chosen through a NASA-sponsored student essay competition.
The rover completed its planned 90-sol mission, then, aided by cleaning events whi...
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Spirit, mission designation MER-A (Mars Exploration Rover - A), is the first of the two rovers of NASA's Mars Exploration Rover Mission. It landed successfully on Mars on 04:35 Ground UTC on January 4, 2004, three weeks before its twin Opportunity (MER-B) landed on the other side of the planet. Its name was chosen through a NASA-sponsored student essay competition.
The rover completed its planned 90-sol mission, then, aided by cleaning events which resulted in higher power from its solar panels, went on to function effectively over twenty times longer than NASA planners expected. This allowed it to perform more extensive geological analysis of Martian rocks and planetary surface features. Initial scientific results from the first phase of the mission (roughly, the 90-sol prime mission) were published in a special issue of the journal Science.
On May 1, 2009, Spirit was stuck in soft soil on Mars, one of the mission's embedding events. NASA is carefully analyzing the situation to get...
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