NASA/JPL . The robotic rovers Spirit and Opportunity arrived on Mars in January 2004 to search for clues of past water activity. They were designed to last three months.

Opportunity, NASA's longest-running Mars rover, outlived its twin rover, Spirit, which went silent in 2010 after getting stuck in a sand trap and running out of power.Both rovers launched to the ...

In 2004, NASA launched two exploration vehicles to the red planet: the Spirit and Opportunity rovers. These two Mars Exploration Rovers were originally designed for 90-day missions to image ...

Three weeks later, on Jan. 25, Opportunity duplicated Spirit’s feat at Meridiani Planum, which straddles Mars’ equator and might have held enough water 3.7 billion years ago to harbor river ...

For six-wheeled, 400-pound mechanical geologists, Mars rovers Spirit and Opportunity have really turned on the charm, working their way into the hearts of an admiring public—and, most powerfully ...

When Opportunity and its twin rover, Spirit, reached Mars in January 2004, there was a fair bit of sniping that NASA, with all that 90-day talk, was playing down expectations.

For the past five years, the Mars rovers, Spirit and Opportunity, have been sampling rocks, exploring craters and gathering temperature data well beyond their expected lifetimes of just three months.

The NASA rovers Spirit and Opportunity landed on Mars in January 2004, on a three-month mission to search for clues about past water activity on the Red Planet. The twin golf-cart-size rovers ...

Designed to operate for at least 90 days on the surface of Mars, project engineers had high hopes that one or both of the Mars Exploration Rovers -- Spirit and Opportunity -- would manage to ...

NASA scientists brief reporters on the status of the Mars missions, including the latest on the rover Spirit and pictures from the rover Opportunity that landed January 25 on Mars. Pictures were ...