Public Events Mark Mars Rovers' Five-Year Anniversary

MEDIA RELATIONS OFFICE
JET PROPULSION LABORATORY
CALIFORNIA INSTITUTE OF TECHNOLOGY
NATIONAL AERONAUTICS AND SPACE ADMINISTRATION
PASADENA, CALIFORNIA 91109. TELEPHONE 818-354-5011
http://www.jpl.nasa.gov

Guy Webster/Rhea Borja 818-354-6278/0850
Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, Calif.
guy.webster@jpl.nasa.gov/rhea.r.borja@jpl.nasa.gov

NEWS RELEASE: 2009-004 January 12, 2009

Public Events Mark Mars Rovers' Five-Year Anniversary

PASADENA, Calif. -- Public events during the next two weeks will share the adventures of the still-
active NASA Mars rovers Spirit and Opportunity, which landed five years ago this month on
missions originally scheduled to last three months.

Rover mission leaders will present free, illustrated talks Thursday, Jan. 15, and Friday, Jan. 16, in
Pasadena, with the Jan. 15 event streamed live online and archived for later viewing.

On Friday, Jan. 23, through Sunday, Jan. 25, rover team members will give a series of talks at Griffith
Observatory in Los Angeles. The observatory will also display a full-size Mars rover model, with
team members available to answer visitors' questions.

Since landing on opposite sides of Mars during January of 2004, Spirit and Opportunity have made
important discoveries about historically wet and violent environments on ancient Mars. They also
have returned a quarter-million images, driven more than 21 kilometers (13 miles), climbed a
mountain, descended into craters, struggled with sand traps and aging hardware, survived dust
storms, and relayed more than 36 gigabytes of data via NASA's Mars Odyssey orbiter. Both rovers
remain operational for new exploration campaigns the team has planned.

The public presentations on Jan. 15 and 16, "Spirit and Opportunity: The Corps of Discovery for
Mars Rolls On," are part of the monthly von Kármán Lecture Series by NASA's Jet Propulsion
Laboratory, Pasadena, Calif. Steve Squyres of Cornell University, Ithaca, N.Y., principal investigator
for the science payloads on the rovers, will deliver the Jan. 15 talk in Beckman Auditorium on the
campus of the California Institute of Technology, Pasadena, on Michigan Avenue one block south of
Del Mar Avenue. JPL's John Callas, project manager for the rovers, will deliver the Jan. 16 talk in
Pasadena City College's Vosloh Forum, 1570 E. Colorado Ave.

Squyres and Callas will begin their presentations at 7 p.m. Admission is free, on a first-come, first-
seated basis. For more information about the lectures and the webcast of the Jan. 15 event, see
http://www.jpl.nasa.gov/events/lectures.cfm?year=2009&month=1 .

At Griffith Observatory in Los Angeles, the full-size rover model will be on display in the Depths of
Space gallery Jan. 23 through Jan. 25, accompanied by rover team members from JPL. Talks about
topics such as how the team drives the rovers and what the rovers have revealed about Mars will be
presented in the observatory's Leonard Nimoy Event Horizon Theater. These talks, by JPL rover-
team members Al Herrera, Scott Lever, Scott Maxwell, John Callas, Bruce Banerdt and Ashley
Stroupe, are scheduled for the following times: 7 p.m. on Jan. 23; 1:30 p.m., 4 p.m. and 7 p.m. on Jan.
24; and 1:30 p.m. and 4 p.m. on Jan. 25.

For more information about visiting Griffith Observatory, see http://www.griffithobs.org/ .

JPL, a division of Caltech, manages the Mars Exploration Rovers for the NASA Science Mission
Directorate, Washington. More information about the rovers is at http://www.nasa.gov/rovers .

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