On January 25, 2004, NASA's Opportunity rover landed on Mars! This was the second of NASA's twin Mars Exploration Rovers to land on the Red Planet. Its counterpart, the Spirit rover, arrived just three weeks earlier.
Opportunity landed on Mars at 12:05 a.m. EST on Jan. 25 (the local time at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, where the rover is controlled, was Jan. 9:05 p.m. EST on Jan. 24.)
Opportunity was the longest-running Mars rover mission. It was only intended to last 90 days, but the rover trekked around the Red Planet for more than 50 times its expected lifetime. Over the years, Opportunity has found meteorites on Mars, observed dust storms and looked for clues about the presence of water in Mars' ancient past.
In 2019, NASA bid farewell to Opportunity after months of silence from the rover following a massive, planet-wide dust storm in 2018.
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