Spirit and Opportunity were green-lit for flight in the summer of 2000. Designed to be twin robot field geologists, they would be equipped with seven science instruments, including cameras and would be delivered to opposite sides of the Red Planet. They were a critical part of a NASA Mars Program mission to “Follow the Water” or to find evidence for past water, and perhaps signs of habitats long gone where life once might have emerged.
Getting the rovers built, tested, buttoned-up and to the Cape was a constantly challenging adventure. If they were to meet the 2003 launch window, Project Manager Pete Theisinger and the engineering development team, along with Squyres and his Athena Science Team, and the thousands of people who played roles in the creation of these ‘bots, had just 36 months to go from a Power Point presentation to two fully equipped and operational rovers packed into their spacecraft, and on the launch pads at the Cape. With but a breath to spare, they made it.
Opportunity left Earth on July 8, 2003 from Cape Canaveral in a picture perfect, blue-sky launch. Three weeks earlier, on June 10th, her twin Spirit blasted off, soaring into space on a similar summer day. It should have been a triumphant moment and it was. But for Squyres, elation was elusive.
Spirit and Opportunity leave Earth
NASA
SPIRIT AND OPPORTUNITY LEAVE EARTH
Spirit [left] launched from Earth on June 10, 2003 on a Delta II launch vehicle from Cape Canaveral Air Force Station, Florida. Three weeks later on July 7, 2003, Opportunity [right] followed. They traveled on a trajectory that delivered them to Mars in about seven months. Despite the naysayers, each rover landed safely and took off on expeditions that surprised everyone.
“In all the years of struggle, one of the things that kept me going was this vision of what launch would be like,” he reflected. “It really surprised me because when we got there, it felt very, very different than I anticipated it would. It was a very bittersweet feeling.”
As Spirit and then Opportunity disappeared, Squyres was moved by the emotion of reality: the rovers had exited Earth forever. “It was hard to say goodbye,” he said.
Seven months later, on January 3, 2004 Pacific Standard Time (PST), Spirit arrived at Mars first, dove into the Martian atmosphere, survived the six minutes of terror, and hit the ground in Gusev Crater protected by airbags. After bouncing for more than 16 minutes, the spacecraft stopped. The robot signaled home. Within a few hours, she sent her first picture postcards, taken with her Navigation Camera, to Earth through the Mars Odyssey Orbiter and the giant antennas of the Deep Space Network (DSN).
Opportunity followed three weeks later, bouncing down on January 24, 2004 PST and rolling right into a small impact crater on the plains of Meridiani, the team called Eagle Crater. It was Earth’s first interplanetary hole-in-one. In the wee hours of the next morning at the MER mission control at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL), this robot’s first images came streaming in and left everyone on site even more jaw dropped. Right there, just in front of Opportunity was the prize the MER scientists had been hoping they might find: bedrock.
Those landings were moments never-to-be-forgotten for everybody who was at JPL, certainly the best moments imaginable for the Entry, Descent and Landing System Manager Rob Manning and the EDL team that night. They were against-all-odds achievements that moved people far and wide across planet Earth. As then JPL Director Charles Elachi encouraged people from the dais at the Opportunity landing press conference: “Go outside and look up at Mars tonight. We have two rovers up there.”
