On this day in 2004, the Spirit rover successfully landed on Mars inside of the crater Gusev.
Spirit, part of a two-rover team, landed three weeks before its sister rover Opportunity and became the first robotic explorer to return a high-definition image of another planet.
Spirit’s mission lasted over 20 times the duration that it had been planned for, and traveled much farther than its planned distance of 600 meters. While the rover stopped transmitting in March of 2010, Spirit provided an enormous amount of science data and images that researchers are still sifting through today.
IDL TIFF file