On this day in space: Jan. 3, 2004: NASA's Spirit rover lands on Mars

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On Jan. 3, 2004, NASA's Spirit rover landed on Mars!

On Jan. 3, 2004, NASA's Spirit rover landed on Mars!

Artist's illustration of NASA's Spirit Mars rover shortly after its Jan. 3, 2004 landing. (Image credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech)

These rovers were designed to last just 90 days on Mars, but Spirit lasted more than six years! It's mission ended in 2011 after the rover got stuck in deep Martian sand.

It touched down at the Gusev crater, where scientists believed to be an old lake bed that was once filled with water. NASA named the landing site Columbia Memorial Station to honor the astronauts who were killed in the Columbia shuttle disaster less than a year earlier.

On This Day in Space: See our full 365-day video archive!

Hanneke Weitering
Hanneke Weitering
Contributing expert

Hanneke Weitering is a multimedia journalist in the Pacific Northwest reporting on the future of aviation at FutureFlight.aero and Aviation International News and was previously the Editor for Spaceflight and Astronomy news here at Space.com. As an editor with over 10 years of experience in science journalism she has previously written for Scholastic Classroom Magazines, MedPage Today and The Joint Institute for Computational Sciences at Oak Ridge National Laboratory. After studying physics at the University of Tennessee in her hometown of Knoxville, she earned her graduate degree in Science, Health and Environmental Reporting (SHERP) from New York University. Hanneke joined the Space.com team in 2016 as a staff writer and producer, covering topics including spaceflight and astronomy. She currently lives in Seattle, home of the Space Needle, with her cat and two snakes. In her spare time, Hanneke enjoys exploring the Rocky Mountains, basking in nature and looking for dark skies to gaze at the cosmos. 

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