Ten years ago today, NASA launched the rover Spirit on a mission to find signs that life may have once existed on Mars. The robotic vehicle faced countless hardships that threatened to derail the ...

PASADENA, Calif. - NASA's Spirit rover reached out to Mars on Friday, extending its robotic arm to snap a series of tight close-ups with a combination microscope and camera that reveal the ...

Few things are harder than hurling a robot into space — and sticking the landing. On the morning of July 4, 1997, mission controllers at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif., were hoping ...

Just past the halfway point of its three-month prime mission, NASA’s Mars Exploration Rover Spirit has achieved several scientific firsts, but may still have its best “Eureka!” moments in front of it.

After months of tests and analysis, engineers plan to beam commands to NASA's Spirit Mars rover Monday, kicking off a long-awaited attempt to free the hardy craft from the talcum powder-like soil of a ...

Spirit, the untiring robotic “wonder child” sent by NASA to explore the eerily earthlike fourth planet from the sun, has completed one martian year–that’s almost two Earth years–on Mars. Designed to ...

Recently, the Mars Exploration Rover "Spirit" has been sleeping through work shifts and suffering from bouts of amnesia. John Callas, rover project manager at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, ...

When humans visit Mars later this century, they will alight on its ochre-hued sands with the same spirit of adventure and thirst for opportunity as a young girl whose essay was selected from among ...

The Mars Spirit rover made some big discoveries on Mars, but the mission almost failed right out of the gate and suffered many setbacks along the way. Ten years ago, NASA launched a rover named Spirit ...