We're NASA and we know it

Mars Rover’s 7 Minutes of Terror

Rovers Still Exploring Mars After 2 Years

"The warranty expired long ago on NASA's twin robots motoring around Mars. These two golf cart-sized vehicles were only expected to last three months.

In two years, they have traveled a total of seven miles. Not impressed? Try keeping your car running in a climate where the average temperature is 67 below zero and where dust devils can reach 100 mph.

'These rovers are living on borrowed time. We're so past warranty on them,' says Steven Squyres of Cornell University, the Mars mission's principal researcher. 'You try to push them hard every day because we're living day-to-day.'

The rover Spirit landed on Mars on Jan. 3, 2004, and Opportunity followed on Jan. 24. Since then, they've set all sorts of records and succeeded in the mission's main assignment: finding geologic evidence that water once flowed on Mars."

Rover Tracks Seen from Orbit

"Wheel tracks left by NASA's Mars Exploration Rover Spirit, and even the rover itself, are visible in this image from the Mars Orbiter Camera on NASA's Mars Global Surveyor orbiter. North is up in this image. The tracks and rover are in the area south of a crater informally named 'Bonneville,' which is just southeast of the center of the image. The orbiter captured this image with use of an enhanced-resolution technique called compensated pitch and roll targeted observation. It took the picture on March 30, 2004, 85 martian days, or sols, after Spirit landed on Mars. The rover had driven from its landing site to the rim of Bonneville and was examining materials around the crater's rim. "

SPACE.com -- Rocky Mountain High: Spirit Rover Surveys its Surroundings

"NASA's Mars rover Spirit is experiencing the robotic high life--literally--now that it has reached to top of Husband Hill after a slow, year-long climb.

Perched some 270 feet--about the height of the Statue of Liberty--above the plains of its Gusev Crater landing site, Spirit has returned images of stunning new vistas that include a potential winter refuge as the Martian seasons progress, mission scientists said Thursday during a press conference at NASA's Washington, D.C. headquarters.



"That's no Mt. Everest, but it's a heck of a climb for our little rover," Steve Squyres, principal investigator of the rover's science mission at Cornell University in Ithaca, New York, told reporters. "When we first touched down at Gusev Crater on Jan. 4, 2004, the Columbia Hills looked impossibly far away.'"