About Mars rover Spirit
- Rover name
- Spirit
- Mission status
- completed
- Launch date
- 2003-06-10
- Landing date
- 2004-01-04
- Martian sols
- 2000
The Spirit and Opportunity rovers together represented NASA's Mars Exploration Rover Mission (MER), part of the Mars Exploration Program. Launched about a month apart in 2003, the twin rovers’ 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.
Each rover is about the size of a golf cart and seven times heavier (about 405 pounds or 185 kilograms) than the Sojourner rover launched on the Mars Pathfinder to Mars mission in 1996.
Spirit and Opportunity were sent to opposite sides of Mars to locations that were suspected of having been affected by liquid water in the past. The plan was for the rovers to move from place to place, to perform geological investigations and to take photographs with mast-mounted cameras (about 5 feet or 1.5 meters off the ground) providing 360-degree stereoscopic views of the terrain.