Mars rover (Sojourner, Spirit, Curiosity, Perseverance)
Rover marciano (Sojourner, Spirit, Curiosity, Perseverance)
- Date
- 1997 · confidence high
- Place
- JPL, Pasadena, California, United States; landing in Ares Vallis, Mars
- Credited to
- NASA JPL (Donna Shirley, Sojourner; Steve Squyres, Spirit and Opportunity; Curiosity, 2012; Perseverance and Ingenuity, 2021)
- Field
- Movement
What was discovered
Autonomous robotic vehicles that traverse the Martian surface analysing rocks, with increasingly daring landings (airbags, sky crane). They demonstrated that Mars once had liquid water.
The first rover on another world was the Soviet Lunokhod 1 (Luna, 1970).
What it led to
- Robotic planetary exploration as the norm and sample return
- Robotic autonomy in remote environments
- The first powered flight on another planet (the Ingenuity helicopter, 2021)
Built on
- Radioisotope thermoelectric generator (RTG)1961
- Lunokhod 1: first robotic rover on the Moon17 de noviembre de 1970
- Viking: first operational Mars landers and life-detection experiments20 de julio de 1976
- Global Positioning System (GPS)1978-1995
- Magellan: radar map of Venus and first planetary aerobraking1990-1994
- Viking probes
- CCD/CMOS sensors
- GPS (inertial navigation)
Made possible
- Ingenuity: first powered flight on another planet19 de abril de 2021
- MOXIE: oxygen produced from the Martian atmosphere20 de abril de 2021
- Tianwen-1 and Zhurong: orbit, landing and rover on Mars in a single mission14 de mayo de 2021
- Ingenuity helicopter
- autonomous robotics
- crewed Mars missions (planning)