ZAP’S FACTS!
ROBOTS & AI

Robots have been driving around Mars for over 25 years.

NASA has landed five rovers on Mars - one of them, Opportunity, lasted 14 years on a 90-day mission.

2 min read
Robots have been driving around Mars for over 25 years.
THE FULL STORY

The first rover to drive on Mars was Sojourner, a microwave-sized robot that landed in 1997. It worked for 83 days. Since then NASA has sent four more: Spirit and Opportunity in 2004, the car-sized Curiosity in 2012 and Perseverance in 2021. All of them were planned for short missions and most of them lasted years longer than expected.

The all-time champion is Opportunity. NASA designed it to last 90 days. Instead it kept driving for almost 15 years - over 28 miles across Mars - until a giant dust storm in 2018 finally covered its solar panels. Its very last signal back to Earth was a low-battery message that scientists summed up as “My battery is low and it’s getting dark.”

Perseverance, which landed in 2021, is even more amazing. It carries a tiny helicopter called Ingenuity that became the first machine to fly on another planet. It is also collecting rock samples that a future mission may bring back to Earth - the first ever Mars rocks studied in our own labs.

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