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The Mars Exploration Rover Missions consist of two
rovers, Spirit and Opportunity, which were launched in the summer
of 2003 and arrived at Mars in January, 2004. Spirit landed January
3 and Opportunity on January 24, 2004. Getting to Mars is never easy
and most missions have ended in failure. The most challenging time
for the rovers were the six minutes when the rovers traveled from
orbit to the surface. Since the radio communication signals take longer
than six minutes to reach Mars from Earth, the landing had be controlled
by automated systems, which in the case of the MER mission worked
very much as planned and both landed safely on the surface.
Animations
of the landing process are available from the NASA website. One of the most important pieces of information from modern space missions to Mars are high resolution images. The first images transmitted from Mars from the Mariner 4 spacecraft were taken in 1965. Each of those early images were about 30 kilobytes in size and took 8.3 hours to transmit. Today, images from the Mars Global Surveyor occupy up to 19 megabytes and require 2 hours to transmit. The Mars Exploration Rovers have sophisticated cameras that take images in a left and right-eye view, which produces stereo or 3-dimensional images. The 3-D images help the engineers and scientists to drive the rovers and determine the geology of Mars. More information on the mission overview is available at the NASA website. |
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