On January 3, 2004, Mars Exploration Rover spirit start making history. It touched the Red Planet for the first time and embarked on one of NASA’s longest and most successful missions – helping us better understand only the inhabitants of the earth, the wonderful universe in which we live.
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spirit is with his twins Opportunity three weeks later, and together, the two drugs discovered the possibility of water on the planet due to the rocks. The landing site for the second rover appears to have the same characteristics as a seabed.
The primary mission would only last 90 sols, or 90 Mars days, but the robbers were so robust that they kicked around the planet for several years to collect data.
To give you an example of how many spirit done, let’s talk distance. NASA only intended it to lie 600 m, or 0.4 miles. Instead, it recorded 7.73 km, or 7.8 miles. As a result, NASA was able to gather a lot of geological information about the planet, far more than expected. This is the mission that people can start dreaming about the colonization of Mars.
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We learned so many. We learned that Mars has dust devils, just like on Earth. We were able to better map the surface of Mars, along with a better understanding of what types of materials each section was composed of. It was an amazing mission in every sense of the word.
Unfortunately, on May 1, 2009 spirit got stuck in a bit of soft sand. This was not the first time this had happened on the mission, and the rover was able to serve as a stationary analysis tool for a while, while NASA tried to figure out how to get it stuck. It never happened. On January 26, 2010, NASA announced that it would probably never be moved. Opportunity continued to explore.
Just two months later, spirit stopped sending to NASA. Fourteen months later, NASA announced that it was no longer trying to contact the rover and had completed its mission.