These have cleaned the solar rays off over and over, and each time it happens, it gives us a new lease on life. In fact, we just had a gigantic one for Opportunity very recently. What we have experienced with both of our rovers, we call them cleaning events, but they're gusts of wind that clean the dust off the solar rays. And what had been seen on previous missions was just that they just build up dust continuously. Mars has this very fine grain dust like cigarette smoke–sized in the Martian atmosphere. One of the things that we thought was gonna kill these vehicles was gonna be buildup of dust on the solar rays. The second thing was we got lucky with the weather. Jim Green: Well, I'd be-I'm glad we did that. And, Jim, if you want to accuse us of over-engineering, I'll plead guilty as charged at this point, okay? Steve Squyres: But, why did they last so long? There are really three reasons. None of us expected the wheels to fall off when the Sun came up on the 91st day, okay? Steve Squyres: Well, okay, so you've got to realize 90 days was when the warranty expired. After that successful landing, everybody had to be on it and working, you know, full tilt to be able to really milk out everything they could in the 90 days. We all know how hard it is to get to the surface. So, you already know going in that, you know, after a successful landing-and Mars is hard. Well, you know, those two rovers, their nominal mission was 90 days. And we got selected for flight by NASA in summer of 2000, and we were on top of the rockets in Florida 34 months later. So, what we did with Spirit and Opportunity was we blended those two technologies together, scaled up the rover massively, put the science payload onto it, and we were off and running. One was airbags for landing and the other one had that beautiful little Sojourner Rover - a tiny thing, about the size of a microwave oven, but it showed that you could actually drive around on Mars. Mars Pathfinder was this magnificent mission back in the '90s that demonstrated and validated two key technologies. We had a suite of instruments ready to do science on Mars but no way to get them there.īut then, we sort of remembered Mars Pathfinder. And what happened was we had already built a set of instruments. And so, NASA was looking for a way to recover from that and regain momentum in the Mars program. There were the two Mars missions that flew in 1998, launched in 1998 that were unsuccessful. Well, our mission kind of arose from catastrophe. But, for those who may not be familiar with their story, Steve, tell us a little bit of background on how Spirit and Opportunity came together. And they've really transformed our knowledge of Mars, you know, that beautiful red planet you can even see on a beautifully clear night in the right place on this planet.Īs we know, the twin rovers, Spirit and Opportunity, were launched in 2003 to explore Mars and search the areas for all sorts of stuff, perhaps even find signs of life. Steve Squyres from Cornell University, and we're talking about the incredible rovers Spirit and Opportunity. Hi, I'm Jim Green, NASA’s Chief Scientist, and this is Gravity Assist. Jim Green: Our solar system is a wondrous place with a single star, our sun, and everything that orbits around it - planets, moons, asteroids and comets - what do we know about this beautiful solar system we call home? It's part of an even larger cosmos with billions of other solar systems. Listen in with Steve Squyers from Cornell University as he recounts the amazing discoveries we’ve made about the Red Planet because of these two long-lived rovers. Although NASA ended communications with the Spirit rover in 2011, Opportunity continued its mission and still operates today. NASA’s Spirit and Opportunity rovers were only supposed to rove around Mars for 90 days.
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