| The Mars Exploration Rover mission seeks to determine the history of climate and water at sites on Mars where conditions may once have been favorable to life. Each rover is equipped with a suite of science instruments that will be used to read the geologic record at each site, to investigate what role water played there, and to determine how suitable the conditions would have been for life.
Science Objectives
Based on priorities of the overall Mars Exploration Program, the following science objectives were developed for Spirit and Opportunity:
- Search for and characterize a diversity of rocks and soils that hold clues to past water activity (water-bearing minerals and minerals deposited by precipitation, evaporation, sedimentary cementation, or hydrothermal activity).
- Investigate landing sites, selected on the basis of orbital remote sensing, that have a high probability of containing physical and/or chemical evidence of the action of liquid water.
- Determine the spatial distribution and composition of minerals, rocks and soils surrounding the landing sites.
- Determine the nature of local surface geologic processes from surface morphology and chemistry.
- Calibrate and validate orbital remote-sensing data and assess the amount and scale of heterogeneity at each landing site.
- For iron-containing minerals, identify and quantify relative amounts of specific mineral types that contain water or hydroxyls, or are indicators of formation by an aqueous process, such as iron-bearing carbonates.
- Characterize the mineral assemblages and textures of different types of rocks and soils and put them in geologic context.
- Extract clues from the geologic investigation, related to the environmental conditions when liquid water was present and assess whether those environments were conducive for life.
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