NASA’s Mars Exploration Rover Mission (MER), is an ongoing robotic space mission involving two rovers, Spirit and Opportunity, exploring the planet Mars. It began in 2003 with the sending of the two rovers — MER-A Spirit and MER-B Opportunity — to explore the Martian surface and geology.

The mission’s scientific objective was to search for and characterize a wide range of rocks and soils that hold clues to past water activity on Mars. The mission was part of NASA’s Mars Exploration Program which includes three previous successful landers: the two Viking program landers in 1976 and Mars Pathfinder probe in 1997.[1]

The total cost of building, launching, landing and operating the rovers on the surface for the initial 90-Martian-day (sol) primary mission was US$820 million.[2] Since the rovers have continued to function beyond their initial 90 sol primary mission, they have each received five mission extensions. The fifth mission extension was granted in October 2007, and runs to the end of 2009.[2][3] The total cost of the first four mission extensions was $104 million and the fifth mission extension is expected to cost at least $20 million.[2]

In July 2007, during the fourth mission extension, Martian dust storms blocked sunlight to the rovers and threatened the ability of the craft to gather energy through their solar panels, causing engineers to fear that one or both of them might be permanently disabled. However, the dust storms lifted, allowing them to resume operations.[4]

On May 1, 2009, during its fifth mission extension, Spirit became stuck in soft soil on Mars.[5] After nearly nine months of attempts to get the rover back on track, including using test rovers on Earth, NASA announced on January 26, 2010 that Spirit was being retasked as a stationary science platform. This mode will enable Spirit to assist scientists in ways that a mobile platform could not, such as detecting “wobbles” in the planet’s rotation which would indicate a liquid core.[6]

In recognition of the vast amount of scientific information amassed by both rovers, two asteroids have been named in their honor: 37452 Spirit and 39382 Opportunity.

The mission is managed for NASA by the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, which designed, built and is operating the rovers.  Go see the Mars Exploration Rover at the Rose Center for Earth and Space featuring the New Hayden Planetarium read more here

Cheick Modibo Diarra (born 1952) is a Malian astrophysicist.

Diarra was born in [[Nioro du Sahel(Mali). After graduating high school in Mali, Cheick Modibo Diarra studied mathematics, physics, and analytic mechanics in Paris at the University of Pierre and Marie Curie, then aerospace engineering at Howard University in Washington, D.C. He was recruited by Caltech’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, a NASA FFRDC Contractor, where he played a role in several NASA programs, including the Magellan probe to Venus, the Ulysses probe to the Sun, the Galileo spacecraft to Jupiter, and the Mars Observer and Mars Pathfinder. He later became the director of NASA’s “Mars Exploration Program Education and Public Outreach.”

In 1999, he obtained permission from NASA to work part-time in order to devote himself to education development in Africa, founding the Pathfinder Foundation. He took a further sabbatical in 2002 to found a laboratory in Bamako, Mali for the development of solar energy. In 2000 and 2001 he also served as a goodwill ambassador for UNESCO. In 2002 and 2003 he served as CEO of the African Virtual University, based in Kenya.

Cheick Modibo Diarra is currently the chairman of Microsoft Africa.

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