2.1 The onward march of third information revolution in the first  (Page 10/14)

Figure 2. The Soujourner rover on Mars

In 1999 NASA lost two space crafts Mars Climate Orbiter and the Mars

Polar Lander .

At this time after careful review, NASA used Pathfinder’s successful

landing approach to place not a lander but a full size rover on Mars. This saw the start of

Mars Exploration Rover Mission.

NASA's Mars Exploration Rover Mission (MER), is an ongoing robotic space mission involving two rovers exploring the planet Mars. The mission is managed for NASA by the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, which designed, built and is operating the rovers.

The mission began in 2003 with the sending of the two rovers  — MER-A Spirit and MER-B Opportunity — to explore the Martian surface and geology . The mission's scientific objective is to search for and characterize a wide range of rocks and soils that hold clues to past water activity on Mars. The mission is part of NASA's Mars Exploration Program which includes three previous successful landers: the two Viking program landers in 1976 and Mars Pathfinder probe in 1997. ^[35]

The total cost of building, launching, landing and operating the rovers on the surface for the initial 90- Martian-day (sol) primary mission was US$820 million. ^[36] Since the rovers have continued to function far beyond their initial 90 sol primary mission (to date both rovers have been functioning on Mars's surface for nearly seven years), they have each received multiple mission extensions.

As of now, 1 ^st March 2011, Spirit is stuck in sand and probably has not survived Martian Winter but Opportunity is still roving around.

In recognition of the vast amount of scientific information amassed by both rovers, two asteroids have been named in their honor: 37452 Spirit and 39382 Opportunity .

Over the years it had become clear that unmanned space missions are the only viable financial propositions achieving comparable results as the manned missions at considerably lower risk. By the launch of ‘Spirit’ and ‘Opportunity’, the twin Mars Rovers launched in Mars Exploration Rover Mission in 2003, it has been demonstrated that

1. these are very effective exploration tools;
2. These have fostered scientific and technological innovations that should find applications on Earth;
3. These should find applications in areas such as autonomous robotics, remote sensing and materials engineering.

Today NASA(US Space agency), ESA(European Space Agency), Russian Space Agency, Chinese Space Agency and Indian Space Agency have Rover Technology as an essential part of their respective Space Programmes.

Jet Propulsion Lab (JPL) is NASA’s lead facility for the exploration of the Solar System. Hardware built in this Lab has been flown to our Moon, Venus, Mars, Mercury, Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus and Neptune.

JPL has launched a new Rover Program called Curiosity Rover under the same Mars Exploration Rover Mission. It is one order of magnitude harder to design and build. It will have a massive 2.3-m-long arm. With this arm it will use a percussion drill to extract samples from within the Martian Rocks. Wheels half a meter in diameter will enable it to traverse difficult terrain, off-road style. With its captive power plant of plutonium-238 thermoelectric generator, it will be able to operate in the winter and at latitudes farther from the equator. The goal is to find micro-organisms in places where previous rovers did not go and to better understand how the availability of water, energy and elements like carbon evolved on the surface of Mars.