Posted by tourdemars to Mars Exploration Rovers at November 22, 2005 12:22 PM

If the Spirit rover were your typical 1-year-old, there'd be lots of pictures of the happy tot, perhaps even with a frosting-smeared face. Of course, Spirit is a bot, not a tot, and this is definitely not your typical birthday. In fact, Sunday's big day actually marked 687 Earth days of operations on the Red Planet — not exactly a nice round number on the Gregorian calendar. But by Martian reckoning, it was exactly a year ago that Spirit landed in Gusev Crater, and that's a cause for celebration at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory.