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Space Topics: Mars Exploration Rovers

Mission Objectives

The Mars Exploration Rovers mission set out to achieve seven, primary science objectives, which both Spirit and Opportunity achieved by the end of April 2004, within their 90-day primary missions:

  • searching for and studying many different types of rocks and soils that might hold clues to past water activity
  • producing maps showing the locations of different kinds of rocks and soils around the landing sites
  • determining what forces have shaped the landscape and how they created the landscape
  • examining places on the ground observed from orbiting spacecraft or, in other words, “ground truthing”
  • studying iron-containing minerals and uncovering minerals that contain water or must have formed in water
  • identifying the minerals and textures in rocks and soils and determining how they were made
  • searching for clues to what the environment was like when liquid water was present, whether the water was present for a long time or not, and whether the environment could have supported life

Spirit found high chlorine, bromine, and sulfur levels in the Columbia Hills, clues that water had once passed through there, but MER team has hypothesized that most likely the water percolated or trickled underground in the region of Gusev Crater. On the other side of Mars, Opportunity found evidence in tiny spheres of hematite, dubbed “blueberries,” and in the striated patterns in bedrock around Meridiani Planum that a large, salty body of water once pooled on the surface, and the team suggested an environment that could have been right for life did once exist there.