🛰️ Mission
Opportunity
Drove a marathon on Mars, on a ninety-day warranty.
- Launched
- 7 July 2003, 23 years ago
- Landed
- 25 January 2004
- Worked for
- 14 years, until 10 June 2018
- Built by
- NASA
- Where it is
- Silent in Perseverance Valley, on the rim of Endeavour Crater
- Best known for
- Landed in a crater full of tiny grey spheres that only form in water — the first hard proof that Mars once had it, standing on the surface
Did you know?
- It drove 45 kilometres in fourteen years, further than anything has driven anywhere off Earth.
- A planet-wide dust storm blotted out the Sun in 2018 and its batteries ran down. Its last message home was about how dark it had become.
Where it went
Mars
The red planet, with the tallest volcano in the solar system.
More NASA photos of OpportunityStraight from NASA’s image library, in the app
Explore more
All of missions
Hubble Space Telescope
Thirty-six years above the weather, and still working.
James Webb Space Telescope
A golden mirror that sees the first galaxies in infrared.
Chandra X-ray Observatory
The telescope that shows what is hot and violent.
Spitzer Space Telescope
Sixteen years of infrared, through dust that hides everything else.
Kepler
Stared at one patch of sky and found thousands of planets.
TESS
Kepler’s successor, watching the whole sky for planets.