![]() ![]() NASA and the Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL), home to all the agency’s Mars rovers, issued a press release. The Boston Red Sox winning the World Series three times! We've been on Mars a very long time.” “Just think of some of the things that have happened back on Earth over the past 12 years,” Squyres suggested. ![]() Twelve years is a long time for rovers designed and dispatched for 3-month tours.so far beyond the imagination, it’s almost unbelievable. Opportunity carried on, seemingly with the “spirit” of her twin onboard. Then, during the mission’s fourth Martian winter in 2010, stuck and unable to angle herself toward the winter Sun, Spirit succumbed. While Opportunity was cruising and crater hopping across the plains of Meridiani, Spirit worked in the colder, more rugged environments of Gusev Crater. And no one thought they would last through the first Martian winter. No one outside the team thought they would make it to the surface in one piece. In the case of MER, it would not be an exaggeration to push that to ‘great significance.’ Opportunity and her twin Spirit were originally each slated to explore for 90 days and drive 600 meters. “These milestones are in a sense arbitrary, but they do carry real significance,” reflected Steve Squyres, MER principal investigator, of Cornell University. On January 24 th, the veteran Mars Exploration Rover (MER) wrapped the last day of her 12 th year of surface operations on Mars, marking an extraordinary, historic achievement for the Mars Exploration Rovers (MER) mission. Along the way, something much grander happened. ![]() Opportunity, stationed along Knudsen Ridge inside Marathon Valley at Endeavour Crater, defied the brutal cold of her seventh Martian winter in January, completing the study of an outcrop, navigating treacherous, steep slopes, and logging another productive month of exploration on the Red Planet. ![]()
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