Three years ago, two machines dropped down onto Mars, surrounded by high-tech balloons.
They bounced. The balloons deflated. And twin rovers named Spirit and Opportunity – separated by three weeks – wheeled out of their entry shells to peer and poke at Mars’ landscape.
Space exploration has never been the same, said researchers who worked on NASA’s Mars rovers and celebrated their third anniversaries this month.
“We know now there was water,” said Ben Clark, a space scientist with Lockheed Martin Space Systems in Littleton.
Liquid water raises the tantalizing possibility that life existed – or even exists – on a planet other than Earth.
Clark, a member of NASA’s Mars rovers science team, called the bots, built in and operated partly from Colorado, one of NASA’s greatest successes in a troubled era.
In 1999, the space agency lost the Mars Polar Lander and the Mars Climate Orbiter, both built by Lockheed Martin.
In 2003, the space shuttle Columbia broke up on re-entry, killing seven astronauts.
Then in 2004, Spirit and Opportunity bounced cartoon-like onto the red planet, and the space program started a winning streak that has far exceeded the most optimistic projections.
Engineers with Lockheed Martin and Ball Aerospace & Technologies Corp. in Boulder helped design and build various parts of the spacecraft. Colorado researchers and engineers spent months at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif., during and after the rovers’ landings.
They expected the machines to explore rocks and soils for three months before they failed.
Three years later, the plucky rovers have traveled more than 10 miles between them and snapped photos and spectroscopic images of rock, salt, craters and clouds.
Among Spirit’s and Opportunity’s science findings:
Iron-rich “blueberries,” mineral spheres that formed in a watery environment.
Layered rocks, salt and other geological clues that suggest water flowed across Mars’ surface for at least thousands of years.
Dust devils that twist across Mars’ surface in spring and summer, and clouds made of tiny water-ice particles – clues about how climates work on another planet.
“These missions have turned out to be bonanzas, absolute bonanzas,” Clark said. “Mars has turned out to be far more diverse and interesting than a lot of us thought.”
Last week, scientists celebrated the rovers’ anniversaries in a virtual party that took place over phone and video lines from Pasadena to Ithaca, N.Y.
“No champagne – we’re still operating the rovers today,” said Steven Squyres, a Cornell University planetary scientist and NASA’s principal investigator for the rover mission.
The long lives of the rovers are partly the result of good planning and partly luck, Squyres said.
When dust settled over the rovers’ solar panels, threatening to cut off power long enough to kill the machines, winds scoured the panels clean again.
When Opportunity got stuck in a Martian sand dune, scientists used a model and sand on Earth to figure out how to free it.
The missions also benefited from extra planning, testing and analysis after NASA lost the earlier two Mars craft, Squyres said.
“It was pretty traumatic for the agency, and our missions arose out of that experience,” he said.
Last month, NASA sent the latest software upgrades to the rovers, designed to help them explore the landscape more efficiently, said Bill Farrand, a researcher with Boulder’s Space Sciences Institute and another mission scientist.
The rovers can now recognize a dust devil and send back images automatically.
“We can drive farther; we can do more things with the instrument arms,” Farrand said.
The robots may be smarter, but they aren’t entirely healthy, he said.
“The Spirit rover is now dragging a wheel, and we have limited mobility,” Farrand said. “Opportunity has a wheel that’s … locked into a straight driving position. We can’t turn it. And it also has had some problems with its robotic arm.”
But beyond science, the rovers have completed another objective, Squyres said – getting kids excited about science and technology.
Steve Lee, a planetary scientist at the Denver Museum of Nature & Science, gave a talk about the rovers last week.
“The public can relate to them,” Lee said. “They get into trouble; they get out of it. … Kids are just totally enamored with these things.
“They’re outraged that we’re not going to bring them back, that the rovers are going to die there on Mars.”
Staff writer Katy Human can be reached at 303-954-1910 or khuman@denverpost.com.
