Description
In 1997, NASA landed the Pathfinder spacecraft on Mars with a small rover named Sojourner. Since that time, NASA has successfully landed four more rovers on the Martian surface, each bigger and more sophisticated than its predecessors. In 2021, China became the first country other than the United States to successfully land a rover on Mars. Over the past 25 years, Martian rovers have identified significant evidence that liquid water flowed over the Martian surface in the distant past. Rovers have also discovered meteorites, taken pictures of Earth and the Moon, seen transits of the Sun by Mars’s two moons, and analyzed the Martian atmosphere. The most recent rover, Perseverance, is going to collect specimens of Martian soil, and launch them back into orbit, where an orbiter will retrieve the samples and then send them back to Earth for analysis. This is the first sample return mission from Mars, and if all goes according to plan, the samples will arrive back on Earth in the mid-2020s. In this class, you will learn about the rich scientific heritage of the rover missions to Mars.
