Mars’ climate from a warm, wet one to the frigid, dry conditions we ob-
serve today.
NASA has declared MAVEN’s primary mission successful, its proposed
science objectives achieved, and approval has been given for a two-
year extended mission until the end of September 2018.
Landers and rovers
MARS LANDER SITES: Global topographic map of Mars, showing the sites of landers and rovers which have successfully soft-landed, together with the
year in which they landed. The planned landing site of ESA’s Schiaparelli is also shown, as are those of the Soviet Mars 3 and ESA’s Beagle 2. Contact with
Mars 3 was lost shortly after landing. Beagle 2 failed to communicate, but has recently been imaged by the MRO HiRISE camera, intact but only partially
deployed. The base map shows relative elevations of the Martian surface, using data from the Mars Orbiter Laser Altimeter (MOLA) on NASA’s Mars Global
Surveyor, a very successful mission which operated at the Red Planet from September 1997 to November 2006. Some key regions and topographic features
are named for reference. Credit: Base map: NASA-JPL/MOLA Science Team - Annotations: Chris Starr
Mars Exploration Rover
(MER) – Opportunity
Named by the winners of a student essay contest, Opportunity and
its companion rover Spirit arrived on the surface of Mars in Januar y
2004. Armed with a complex array of cameras, scientific instruments
and a rock abrasion tool, and powered by solar panels and radio-
isotope heater units, their main scientific goal was to search for and
characterize a wide range of rocks and soils that might provide evi-
dence of past water activity on Mars. While the Mars Exploration Rovers
were not equipped to detect life directly, their search for evidence of
past water could help establish the potential habitability of the environ-
ment in the planet’s history. The rovers’ target sites – on opposite sides
of Mars - were considered likely to have been affected by liquid water
in the past. Spirit went to Gusev Crater, a possible former lake in a giant
impact crater. Opportunity targeted Meridiani Planum where mineral
deposits indicative of a humid past had been identified from orbit, par-
ticularly by Mars Global Surveyor and Mars Odyssey.
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