Spirit and Opportunity celebrate five years on Mars.

NASA Mars rovers Spirit and Opportunity reach five distinguished years of exploration on the red planet.

The first of the NASA Mars rovers to land on the planet was Spirit, which touched down on 3 January 2004 and Opportunity followed 21 days later.

Both rovers have exceeded the US space agency’s expectations – they were originally predicted to operate for only three months, but they have survived the harsh Martian conditions and are still functioning.

The rovers have made many important findings, which have helped scientists in their understanding of the red planet. They have also traversed a distance of over 21 kilometres and taken hundreds of thousands of images from the planet’s surface.

John Callas, Project Manager for Spirit and Opportunity, said: “These rovers are incredibly resilient considering the extreme environment the hardware experiences everyday.

“We realise that a major rover component on either vehicle could fail at any time and end a mission with no advance notice, but on the other hand, we could accomplish the equivalent duration of four more prime missions on each rover in the year ahead.”

Spirit and Opportunity are now embarking on their next missions – Spirit will head south of the site it spent most of 2008 exploring and Opportunity is travelling towards the Endeavour crater which is twenty times larger than the previously-explored Victoria crater.

“The journeys have been motivated by science, but have led to something else important”, said Steve Squyres of Cornell University, Principal Investigator for the rovers. “This has turned into humanity’s first overland expedition on another planet.

“When people look back on this period of Mars exploration decades from now, Spirit and Opportunity may be considered most significant not for the science they accomplished, but for the first time we truly went exploring across the surface of Mars.”

For further information about Spirit and Opportunity rovers, visit: http://www.nasa.gov/rovers ^[1].