🛰️ Mission
Spirit
Sent for ninety days, worked for six years.
- Launched
- 10 June 2003, 23 years ago
- Landed
- 4 January 2004
- Worked for
- 6 years, until 22 March 2010
- Built by
- NASA
- Where it is
- Stuck in soft sand at Troy, in Gusev Crater, where it sent its last signal
- Best known for
- Found rocks altered by water in a crater everyone had expected to be dry, and a patch of nearly pure silica left by a hot spring
Did you know?
- Its mission was meant to last 90 Martian days. It lasted 2,208.
- One of its wheels seized and had to be dragged. The furrow it scraped is what uncovered the silica — the discovery came from the broken wheel.
Where it went
Mars
The red planet, with the tallest volcano in the solar system.
More NASA photos of SpiritStraight 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.