How do Spirit and Opportunity differ from the first Mars rover?
They are much larger and much more capable. The rover that flew to Mars in 1996-7 on the Mars Pathfinder mission was really just an engineering demonstration vehicle; it didn’t have much of a science payload on it or the capability to go very far from its lander. It never got more than about 10 or 20 metres away from its lander. This time we are flying a much, much larger vehicle. It’s more than 180 kg in weight. It’s able to travel tens of metres in a day across the Martian surface and it carries an entire suite of scientific instruments with it. It’s a real robotic explorer. Spirit and Opportunity: Nasa space robots’ Mars exploration mission At-a-glance What are Spirit and Opportunity going to be looking for? The purpose of the mission is to try to find out whether or not Mars was once the kind of place that could have supported life. Mars is a really cold, dry, miserable place today. It is not an environment at its surface that is very well suited to life. And yet when we look down
