Eight years ago today (January 25, 2004), the Mars Exploration Rover -B (MER -B) slammed into the Martian atmosphere and executed a successful Entry, Descent, and Landing on the Red Planet – beginning what was supposed to be 90 days of science operations on the surface of Mars. Eight years and 2,922 Earth-days later, Opportunity continues its mission of exploration of the Martian surface, unlocking the mysteries of Mars and serving as a symbol of endurance while paving the way for future human missions to the Red Planet.

NASA has sent its Mars Rover, Opportunity, on its first winter working vacation since the solar-powered vehicle began exploring the red planet’s surface several years ago. Similar to humans who travel to sunny locations during the winter, the robotic rover will spend the next several months literally soaking up sunlight. The U.S. space agency, NASA, says it positioned Opportunity with its solar panel angled toward the Sun to make sure the rover will have enough power to last for the duration of the long Martian winter. Mission scientists say it was not necessary for Opportunity to be kept in a Sun-facing position the previous four Martian winters because its landing site just south of the planet's equator gets relatively strong sunlight year-round. They decided to use the maneuver this year because the rover’s solar panels were caked with an unusually thick coating of dust.

NASA is expecting throngs of people to attend the launch of its newest Mars rover on Saturday (Nov. 26), according to agency officials. The Mars Science Laboratory (MSL), or Curiosity rover, is scheduled to lift off on Saturday at 10:02 a.m. EST (1502 GMT) from the Cape Canaveral Air Force Station in Florida. The car-size rover will launch into space atop an unmanned Atlas 5 rocket. The crowd size is expected to break previous records for the launch of a robotic spacecraft, NASA officials have said.

It's been a long, lonely three years for NASA's Opportunity rover, which has just finished a 13-mile (21-kilometer) trek from Victoria Crater across the Martian wasteland of Meridiani Planum to Endeavour Crater. A newly released time-lapse video from NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory condenses the odyssey down to just three minutes. The video draws upon a series of 309 images, each taken when the rover stopped driving at the end of a Martian day. The pictures give you a sense of the loneliness that an astronaut might feel while following in Opportunity's wheel tracks. Drifts of sand go on for miles and miles, interrupted only by craters or patches of bedrock. The soundtrack for the video was created by taking low-frequency recordings from Opportunity's accelerometers and speeding them up by a factor of 1,000. "The sound represents the vibrations of the rover while moving on the surface of Mars," Paolo Bellutta, a roer planner at JPL in Pasadena, Calif., said in NASA's video advisory. "When the sound is louder, the rover was moving on bedrock. When the sound is softer, the rover was moving on sand."

A view of a memorial to victims of the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks on the World Trade Center towers was taken on Mars yesterday, on the 10th anniversary of the attacks. The memorial, made from aluminum recovered from the site of the twin towers in weeks following the attacks, serves as a cable guard on a tool on NASA's Mars Exploration Rover Opportunity and bears an image of the American flag. The memorial is on the rover's rock abrasion tool, which was being made in September 2001 by workers at Honeybee Robotics in lower Manhattan, less than a mile from the World Trade Center.

Ten years after the September 11 terrorist attacks, tributes to the thousands who lost their lives have extended into space, from Earth's orbit to the surface of Mars. Mementos were carried into space for the families of the victims, flags were flown as memorials to the fallen first responders and metal recovered from Ground Zero, the site of the World Trade Center buildings in New York, was incorporated into rovers sent to explore the Red Planet. American astronauts have also radioed down from space their own tributes, starting the day of the attacks to this week, pausing to remember those who died on the tenth anniversary of their loss. "It's gratifying knowing that a piece of the World Trade Center is up there on Mars," Stephen Gorevan, founder and chairman of Honeybee Robotics that built the rovers' rock abrasion tools, said. "That shield on Mars, to me, contrasts the destructive nature of the attackers with the ingenuity and hopeful attitude of Americans."

It has been driving on and off for more than seven years, but now it has reached its new destination. Opportunity, a small exploratory rover that landed on Mars in 2004, has trundled to a crater called Endeavour. And the first rock it looked at has already opened a new chapter in the study of Mars, NASA scientists said Thursday. On a telephone news conference, mission scientists giddily described that rock: full of zinc and bromine, elements that, at least for rocks on Earth, would be suggestive of geology formed with heat and water. “This rock doesn’t look like anything else we’ve seen before” on Mars, said Steven W. Squyres, a professor of astronomy at Cornell and principal investigator of the rover mission.

Talk about a tough road to climb. On 24 June, mission scientists endorsed two landing sites for NASA's next Mars rover from a shortlist of four. One of the two would see Curiosity tackle a mound of rocks nearly as high as mount Kilimanjaro. Where to land the $2.5 billion robot, due to blast off in November, has been debatedMovie Camera for years. NASA will now mull over the mission scientists' recommendations but is not obliged to follow either of them.

When NASA's newest Mars rover dives into the Martian atmosphere next year, it will be cocooned in the largest "beat the heat" system ever sent to the Red Planet. To ensure that the nuclear-powered rover — called the Mars Science Laboratory (MSL), or "Curiosity" for short — survives its fiery entry and reaches a pinpointed landing spot, it will have a huge heat shield and back shell that together form a protective aeroshell.

NASA has pulled the plug on one of its two Mars rovers. Spirit hasn't been heard from in more than a year, and now the space agency says it's abandoning hope that it will hear from the rover again. Any disappointment that Spirit's mission has come to an end has to be tempered by the fantastic success of the robotic explorer. Intended to last 90 days, Spirit operated in Gusev Crater on Mars for more than six Earth years.

This HD video is of a 360-degree panorama taken by Nasa Mars Rover, ‘Opportunity’ in April 2004. It was taken on the rim of the Eagle Crater in the Meridiani Plains. NASA entitled it ‘Lion King’. It consists of 558 pictures taken over two solar days. This video is a capture of a program called HD Panorama running at 1280×720 resolution.

NASA's Mars rover Opportunity has its plans for New Year's Eve all sorted out — it will be poking around a football-field-size crater called Santa Maria. Opportunity made it to Santa Maria, which is about 295 feet (90 meters) wide, on Dec. 16. It will spend a few more weeks examining rocks exposed at the crater, checking out minerals that likely formed in the presence of water billions of years ago, researchers said. The Santa Maria stop marks a slight detour for Opportunity, which is making its slow, steady way to a giant crater called Endeavour.

A new Mars movie clip gives us a rover's-eye view of a bluish Martian sunset, while another clip shows the silhouette of the moon Phobos passing in front of the sun. America's Mars Exploration Rover Opportunity, carefully guided by researchers with an artistic sense, has recorded images used in the simulated movies. These holiday treats from the rover's panoramic camera, or Pancam, offer travel fans a view akin to standing on Mars and watching the sky. "These visualizations of an alien sunset show what it must have looked like for Opportunity, in a way we rarely get to see, with motion," said rover science team member Mark Lemmon of Texas A&M University, College Station. Dust particles make the Martian sky appear reddish and create a bluish glow around the sun.

How far would you go for a better electric car? The ends of the earth? The moon? Ari Jónsson's answer is further than either of these places. He can help find a better electric car on Mars. Jónsson's, of Reykjavík University, spoke at the 2010 Driving Sustainability conference in Reykjavík, Iceland last weekend on the topic "Ultimate Sustainability." In this case, ultimate isn't an understatement. Jónsson helped NASA develop the electric rovers, Spirit and Opportunity, that were sent to the Red Planet in 2003 and performed way beyond anyone's expectations since arriving in the harsh, harsh environment. Think Nissan is being careful with the cold weather package for the Leaf? Try getting a battery ready for temperatures that can drop to -50 or -80 C at night. Then try powering these batteries from the sun in a place that gets less solar energy (Mars is further from the sun than the Earth) and where the sky is often covered by dust storms – and that dust can come to rest on the solar panels. In short, try building an electric vehicle (EV) for the worst possible scenario and make is 100 percent sustainable. It's not easy, but the lessons learned have Earthbound applications.

When NASA's Mars Exploration Rover Opportunity left Victoria Crater two years ago this month, the rover science team chose Endeavour Crater as the rover's next long-term destination. With a drive of 111 meters (364 feet) on Monday, Sept. 8, Opportunity reached the estimated halfway point of the approximately 19-kilometer (11.8-mile) journey from Victoria to the western rim of Endeavour.