Mars Mission

A little over one year ago, the twin rovers Spirit and Opportunity bounced safely to land on the surface of Mars. Since then, over 60,000 pictures have been streamed back to Earth providing a wealth of data on the Martian climate, geophysics, and mineralogy with the goal of answering the question “Did life once exist?” This presentation will discuss some of the mission’s engineering challenges, their solutions, the resulting science discoveries that have occurred, and where advanced information technology and high performance computing in particular played important roles in supporting one of the most ambitious space exploration endeavors to date. Some concluding comments will be made on the emerging new challenges that will face robotic and human missions in the coming decades.