The Rover for this project is based on the Spirit Rover. Spirit is one of two Rovers that NASA has launched in 2003 as part of the $800 million Mars Exploration Rover mission. The Spirit arrived to Mars January 2004, they were trying to figure out if life ever existed on Mars. The promised warranty on Spirit was 90 Martian Days, but the Rover ended up lasting more than 2,200 Sols, or 2,266 Earth days. The Spirit Rover stopped communicating with Earth March 22, 2010, after it got stuck in a sand trap. Spirit’s twin rover, Opportunity, operated longer. It was active at least as late as June 2018, until it was able to charge its batteries due to the sandstorm. NASA is counting its efforts to get in contact with the Rover they sent to Mars because it got in a sandstorm while it was exploring Mars. So that’s what my project is all about.
The reason why the rover Is Name Spirit is because a girl with dreams wanted to name it. The NASA administrator Sean O’Keefe and 9-year-old Sofia Collis,who wrote an essay in a naming contest for the rovers, unveiled the names at NASA’s Kennedy Space center. Their third grader explorer in Scottsdale Arizona. They were excited to finally have good names to undertake the missions. It was 400 million USD to build Spirit. Spirit only last for 7 years and Opportunity is still operating till now. Spirit during its mission, explored a plain strewn with volcanic rocks and with impacted craters. It found indications that small amounts of water that had might gotten into the cracks in the rocks and might’ve affected the rocks surfaces.Spirit’s extended mission began with the rover starting a long trek toward a range of hills on the horizon.
Jet Propulsion Laboratory built the Spirit rover for NASA to put on Mars. A rover or sometimes planetary rovers is a space exploration vehicle designed to move across the surface of a planet or other celestial body. Some rovers have been designed to be able to transport members of a human spaceflight crew; others have been partially or fully autonomous robots. The aeroshell for the Mars exploration rover is based on the Mars pathfinder and Mars Viking designs. The aeroshell is made of two principal parts: the heat shield (flat, brownish half) the backshell (large, white-painted, cone-shaped half). A neck and a head are the two main parts for the rover and a mast camera to give the rovers a human-scale view. They also need eyes. cameras and instruments that give the rovers information about their environment.
When the Spirit rover was in Mars it only went about 7.73 km (4.8 mi). The launch date for the rover was June 10,2003, 10:58 AM MST and the landing date was January 4,2004, at 04:35 UTC. The rover was too complicated and to expensive for a high school robotics project, but the ors should cost less than $2,500. That’s not exactly an impulse purchase, but itself cost about $2.5 billion. They created the rover to go to Mars to see if they were able to find the history of water. At the start of each Martian day, called a ‘sol,’ controllers on Earth beam instructions to the rover about where to go and what to do. When Spirit was up in Mars all it found was dust devils, Ancient Habitable environments.
Some rovers usually arrive at the planetary surface on a lander-style spacecraft. Rovers that are created to land on another planet, besides Earth, to find out information and to take samples. They can collect dust, rocks, and even take pictures . They are very useful for exploring the universe. The Sojourner rover on the Pathfinder mission carried one 40-amp-hour lithium battery. The Mars Exploration Rovers carry two 8-amp-hour lithium batteries. During the rovers’ prime missions, their solar arrays were able to produce about 900 watt-hours of energy per martian day, or sol.