Over the past 16 years the Mars rovers: Spirit (2004), Opportunity (2004), and Curiosity (2012) have collectively driven over 35 miles on the Mars surface. While some days a rover may drive less than a meter or not at all, other days may have the rover driving over 100 meters. The engineers who plan the drives, called Rover Planners, have to define the criteria the rover must accomplish during the drive in order for it to be considered a success. They must also think about the constraints that may limit the rover's ability to successfully complete the drive. What obstacles are in the way? Is there a slope it has to cross? Is the slope possibly too sleep? Does the terrain (or landscape) change at any part during the drive? Let's not forget the collective sigh of relief and celebration when Rover Planners were able to throw Opportunity into reverse and get it unstuck from a sand dune on the Mars surface.

To successfully plan a rover's mission path, some things would depend on which part of Mars the rover is driving through and how exactly the rover was built. It may also depend on the condition of the rover's travel components over time. For example when planning Curiosity's continued mission path, it now has to be taken into consideration the wear developing on its wheels.

In this activity, like rover Planners, you will have to define what a successful drive of your rover will look like and identify any limiting factors it could potentially face on its "drive." When developing your rover design, be sure to take a look at the rover images we've included along with the video depicting recent tests of the Mars 2020 rover - Perseverance. While some of the rovers may look very simple in comparison to what you see on Earth, remember that rovers are very expensive to build and require careful planning and engineering to design against extreme radiation exposure and the huge mechanics involved in getting each rover successfully to the Mars surface.

For more than 550 years, mankind has had the ability to observe and measure the pressure and velocity of the wind through the use of the anemometer.

The earliest anemometer was designed by Italian inventor and architect Leon Battista Alberti in 1450. His device consisted of a disk placed perpendicular to the direction of the wind that would spin due to the wind, the angle of inclination of the disk momentarily revealing its force.

This same anemometer was later “re-invented” many years later by Englishman Robert Hooke, who is often mistakenly credited as the anemometer’s inventor.

The most common anemometer, still widely used today, is the Hemispherical Cup Anemometer, which has three or four small hollow metal cups of hemispheres set to catch the wind and revolve around a vertical rod. The revolutions of the Hemispherical Cup Anemometer are used to calculate the velocity of the wind.

The hemispherical cup anemometer was invented by John Thomas Romney Robinson of Ireland in 1846. A combination of wheels recorded the number of revolutions in a given time frame.

Anemometers today employ a range of new technologies to measure wind speed and pressure, including sound waves, laser and Doppler technology, and electrical currents. How could anemometers be used in our exploration of the surface of Mars?