Mars rovers and landers

8 min read

Key facts

First successful landers	Viking 1 and 2, 1976
First rover	Sojourner, 1997
Longest-lived rover	Opportunity, 2004–2018, about 28 miles driven
Active NASA rovers (as of 2026)	Curiosity (since 2012) and Perseverance (since 2021)
First powered flight on another planet	Ingenuity helicopter, 2021, 72 flights
China's rover	Zhurong, landed 2021, dormant since 2022
Landing method	Parachutes, rockets, airbags or a sky crane
Mars Sample Return	NASA-ESA plan not funded as of 2026

In short

Robotic landers and rovers have explored Mars since 1976, and two NASA rovers are still working as of 2026.
Spirit and Opportunity found clear signs that liquid water once soaked the surface.
Curiosity showed that Gale crater once held a lake with the chemistry life could use.
Perseverance collects rock samples in Jezero crater, and Ingenuity made the first powered flights on another planet.
As of 2026, the joint NASA-ESA plan to return those samples to Earth has lost its funding.

Why send robots to Mars

Mars is the most Earth-like planet nearby, and it once had rivers, lakes and a thicker atmosphere. That makes it the best place in the Solar System to look for signs of past life.

Landing there is hard. The atmosphere is too thin to slow a spacecraft fully, yet thick enough to burn one up. Missions use heat shields, parachutes and rockets, and a signal takes between about 3 and 22 minutes to reach Earth, so every landing runs on autopilot.

The first visitors

NASA's Viking 1 and 2 landed in 1976 and sent back the first long-term photos and weather reports from the surface. Their experiments looked for microbes in the soil, but the results were inconclusive.

In 1997, Mars Pathfinder bounced to a landing on airbags and released Sojourner, a rover about the size of a microwave oven. It drove only about 330 feet in total but proved that a wheeled robot could explore another planet. Later landers, such as Phoenix in 2008, found water ice just under the soil near the north pole, and InSight, from 2018 to 2022, recorded more than 1,300 marsquakes.

Spirit and Opportunity

The twin rovers Spirit and Opportunity landed on opposite sides of Mars in January 2004. Each was planned to last about 90 days.

Opportunity found small round grains nicknamed blueberries and minerals that form only in water, strong evidence that its landing site was once wet. Spirit found silica-rich soil that likely came from hot springs.

Spirit got stuck in soft sand in 2009 and fell silent in 2010. Opportunity kept going until a planet-wide dust storm covered its solar panels in 2018, after driving about 28 miles, the longest distance of any off-Earth vehicle at the time.

Curiosity

Curiosity, a car-sized rover powered by a nuclear battery, landed in Gale crater in August 2012. It was lowered on cables by a rocket-powered sky crane, a method never tried before.

It found that the crater once held a long-lived lake whose water was fresh enough, and whose rocks held the right chemical ingredients, to support microbes if any existed. It has also detected organic molecules and puzzling changes in methane in the air.

As of 2026, Curiosity is still climbing the layered slopes of Mount Sharp, reading Mars's climate history layer by layer.

Perseverance and Ingenuity

Perseverance landed in Jezero crater, an ancient lake with a river delta, in February 2021. Its main job is to look for signs of ancient life and to seal promising rock cores in tubes for a possible return to Earth. It has filled more than two dozen sample tubes.

In 2025, NASA reported that a rock nicknamed Cheyava Falls, sampled in 2024, holds features that could be a potential biosignature, a pattern that life might leave behind. Scientists stress that non-living processes could also explain it, and only lab study on Earth could settle the question.

Perseverance carried Ingenuity, a 4-pound helicopter. It made the first powered, controlled flight on another planet in April 2021 and flew 72 times before a damaged rotor ended its mission in January 2024.

China's Zhurong

China's Tianwen-1 mission put an orbiter, a lander and the Zhurong rover on Mars in May 2021, making China the second country to operate a rover there. Zhurong explored Utopia Planitia, a vast northern plain, and its radar suggested buried layers that may have been shaped by water.

Zhurong went into hibernation in May 2022 for the Martian winter and did not wake up, probably because dust covered its solar panels. China plans its own sample-return mission, Tianwen-3, around the end of the decade.

Mars Sample Return as of 2026

Mars Sample Return was a joint NASA and ESA plan to collect Perseverance's tubes and fly them to Earth. Its cost estimates rose sharply, and in early 2026 the US Congress passed a budget that did not fund it, effectively ending the program in its planned form.

As of 2026, the samples remain sealed on Mars, some in a depot on the crater floor and some aboard the rover. They could still be collected by a future mission. Meanwhile, you can see Mars itself with the naked eye as a steady orange-red point; around opposition, a small telescope shows its polar cap and dark markings.