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NASA's Mars Exploration Rover (MER) Mission is an ongoing robotic mission of exploring Mars, that began in 2003 with the sending of two rovers — Spirit and Opportunity — to explore the Martian surface and geology. more...

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The mission is led by Project Manager Peter Theisinger of NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory and principal investigator Steven Squyres, professor of astronomy at Cornell University.

Primary among the mission's scientific goals is to search for and characterize a wide range of rocks and soils that hold clues to past water activity on Mars. The mission is part of NASA's Mars Exploration Program which includes three previous successful landers: the two Viking landers in 1976 and Pathfinder in 1997.

The total cost of building, launching, landing and operating the rovers on the surface for the initial 90 day primary mission was about US$820 million. Since the rovers are still functioning four years after landing, mission funding has been extended to "possibly through 2009". In July of 2007, Martian dust storms blocked sunlight to the rovers and threatened the ability of the craft to gather energy through their solar panels, causing engineers to fear that one or both of them might be permanently disabled; however, the dust storms have lifted and both rovers have resumed operations.

In recognition of the vast amount of scientific information amassed by both rovers, two asteroids have been named in their honor: 37452 Spirit and 39382 Opportunity.

Timeline

The MER-A rover, Spirit, was launched on June 10, 2003 at 17:59 UTC, and MER-B, Opportunity, on July 7, 2003 at 15:18 UTC. Spirit landed in Gusev crater on January 4, 2004 at 04:35 Ground UTC. Opportunity landed in the Meridiani Planum on the opposite side of Mars from Spirit, on January 25, 2004 05:05 Ground UTC. In the week following Spirit's landing, NASA's website recorded 1.7 billion hits and 34.6 terabytes of data transferred, eclipsing records set by previous NASA missions.

On January 21, 2004, the Deep Space Network lost contact with Spirit, for reasons originally thought to be related to a thunderstorm over Australia. The rover transmitted a message with no data, but later that day missed another communications session with the Mars Global Surveyor. The next day, JPL managed to receive a beep from the rover, indicating that it was in fault mode. On the 23rd, the flight team succeeded in making the rover send. The fault was believed to have been caused by an error in the rover's Flash memory subsystem. The rover did not perform any scientific activities for 10 days, while engineers updated its software and ran tests. The problem was corrected by reformatting Spirit's flash memory and upgrading the software with a patch to avoid memory overload; Opportunity was also upgraded with the patch as a precaution. Spirit returned to full scientific operations by 5 February. This has to date been the most serious anomaly in the mission.

Read more at Wikipedia.org