NASA Celebrates One-Year Mars Rover Anniversary

Has it been a year already? NASA landed its first Mars rover Spirit on January 3, 2004, which was soon followed by the rover Opportunity on January 24, 2004, after a seven-month journey of nearly 300 million miles from planet Earth. To celebrate this historic event, NASA has created a special Mars Anniversary Flash website that reviews the extraordinary accomplishments of the twin rover expeditions to Mars. Take a guided slide show and audio tour, or sit back and watch home movies of the landers as they navigate across the rocky terrain. The Flash website also provides glimpses of Mars missions to come including the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter mission planned to launch in August of this year and arrive in 2006, the Mars Phoenix Lander mission scheduled to arrive on Mars in 2008, and the Mars Science Laboratory mission planned to arrive in 2010. Among the top priorities of these missions is to study the atmospheric and soil compositions to determine whether environmental conditions have existed that could support life on Mars. You can keep up with the daily progress of the current rover mission by visiting the Mars Exploration Rover Mission homepage.