After completing her primary mission and with the mission’s first extension, Spirit headed across Gusev to the Columbia Hills, a collection of seven hills, each of which the MER team named to memorialize the seven astronauts who died on Columbia’s final, tragic flight in 2003. The rover would hike to the two summits of Husband Hill in 2005.
The hematite that drew them to the Meridiani plains, the MER scientists found, is all around the surface, eroded from the strata and concentrated on the surface in spherules – blueberries, as the team dubbed them, after the color they took on in false color images – and some were still embedded in outcrops. The soils, they found, are fine-grained basaltic sands mixed with dust and sulfate rich outcrop debris.
On the other side of the planet, Spirit, found mineralogical evidence for past water in the fractures of a two-foot tall volcanic rock named Humphrey while picking her way through the rocky terrain to get to Bonneville Crater. With the mission’s first extension, this rover headed across Gusev to the Columbia Hills, a collection of seven hills, each of which the MER team named for one of the seven astronauts who died on Columbia’s final, tragic flight in February 2003.
Opportunity, meanwhile, roved out of Eagle Crater and headed for Endurance Crater. There, she became the first rover to drive into a crater on Mars. Not long after that, she became the first robot to inspect her own heat shield, and discover an intact meteorite. Then she took off on a journey to an impossible dream destination, Victoria Crater.
In the spring of 2005, Spirit became first robot to capture images of dust devils in action from the surface, and on her Sol 421st sol (March 10, 2005), she shot captured two. Historically, there was a dust devil identified in a single image from the Mars Pathfinder mission in 1997.
No one expected Spirit to last through the first winter, but the rover made it to the Columbia Hills in June 2004 and found north-facing slopes where she could position herself so her solar arrays pointed toward the winter Sun. By “hopping” from one north-facing slope to another, like a frog from lily pad to lily pad, the rover showed she had the right robot stuff to survive and pioneered what would become the mission’s winter survival strategy.
In late August 2005, Spirit reached the summit of Husband Hill, named for Rick Husband, Columbia’s final Commander. Then in late September 2005, she hiked to the hill’s second summit, earning the distinction of being the first robot to climb a hill as tall as the Statue of Liberty, about 82 meters or 270 feet. It was impressive for a robot that wasn’t designed for mountaineering.
