Thursday 25 January 2024

Celebrating NASA’s Spirit and Opportunity Rovers’ Mars Landings

In this commemorative poster, Spirit and Opportunity, NASA's twin rovers, pose atop the rocky Martian landscape, facing away from each other. The dominant colors of the image are red, purple, orange, and white. The Martian sky, which fades from purple at the top to orange at the bottom, takes up three-quarters of the image. A light orange "20" in a thin, simple font stretches over the sky; it is slightly covered up by the rovers. At bottom left is the text "Trailblazers" and "Spirit & Opportunity 20th Anniversary." At bottom right is the red JPL logo.
NASA/JPL-Caltech

NASA’s twin rovers, Spirit and Opportunity, stand on the Martian landscape in this poster created to commemorate their 20th landing anniversary.

The rovers landed in January 2004, on opposite sides of the planet in locales that scientists suspected had been affected by liquid water in the past. Their 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—and what they found rewrote textbooks.

In addition to proving that water once existed on Mars, the rovers also far exceeded their initial planned lifetimes. Spirit operated for 6 years, 2 months, and 19 days, more than 25 times its original intended lifetime, and Opportunity operated for almost 15 years, setting several records.

Download the poster free here.

Image Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech



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