The history of the Mars rover begins in 1971, when two Soviet landers carried 4.5 kg PrOP-M rovers on skis; one crashed and the other fell silent. NASA's 10.6 kg Sojourner made the first drive on Mars in July 1997, followed by Spirit and Opportunity in 2004, Curiosity in 2012, and Perseverance and China's Zhurong in 2021. No single person invented the Mars rover: Alexander Kemurdzhian's team built the first, and JPL's Donald Bickler invented the rocker-bogie all five NASA rovers ride on. Mars Rally Championship, a free browser rally game, imagines the next step: a rover with a driver.
When did the first rover land on Mars?
The first rovers reached Mars in 1971, aboard the Soviet Mars 2 lander, which crashed on 27 November, and Mars 3, which touched down on 2 December and fell silent within two minutes; neither rover is known to have moved. The first rover to drive on Mars was NASA's Sojourner, which landed with Mars Pathfinder on 4 July 1997; how many rovers are on Mars tells both landings in full and tracks every rover since.
Who invented the Mars rover?
Nobody invented the Mars rover alone; four names come closest:
- Alexander Kemurdzhian (1921–2003) led the roughly 150 engineers at VNIITransmash who designed and built PrOP-M, the first rover to reach Mars.
- Donald Bickler, a mechanical engineer at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, invented the rocker-bogie suspension in 1988. His patent, granted in 1989, describes six wheels that stay loaded on rough ground without soft springs. JPL engineer Jaime Waydo, whom he mentored, called him "the father and inventor of Martian mobility".
- Donna Shirley managed the JPL team that built Sojourner, the first rover to drive on Mars.
- Steve Squyres, a Cornell University planetary scientist, was principal investigator for the science payload of Spirit and Opportunity.
The strongest institutional claim is JPL's: it designed and built all five NASA Mars rovers.
The history of the Mars rover, 1971 to 2030
This Mars rover timeline lists every rover design to reach Mars, plus the next:
| Landed | Rover | Agency | Mass | How it landed | Power | First it achieved |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1971 | PrOP-M, on Mars 2 and Mars 3 | Soviet Union | 4.5 kg | Aboard its lander; Mars 2 crashed | Cable from the lander | First rovers to reach Mars; neither known to have moved |
| 1997 | Sojourner | NASA | 10.6 kg | Airbags, on Mars Pathfinder | Solar | First rover to drive on Mars; first rocker-bogie off Earth |
| 2004 | Spirit and Opportunity | NASA | 185 kg each | Airbags | Solar | Opportunity: first marathon on another world; 45.16 km in all |
| 2012 | Curiosity | NASA | 899 kg | Sky crane | Plutonium-238 generator | First sky-crane landing; first nuclear-powered Mars rover |
| 2021 | Perseverance | NASA | 1,025 kg | Sky crane, with terrain-relative navigation | Plutonium-238 generator | First rock cores sealed for a possible return to Earth; carried the first Mars helicopter |
| 2021 | Zhurong | CNSA (China) | 240 kg | Aboard the Tianwen-1 lander | Solar | First non-US rover to drive on Mars; first with active suspension |
| 2030, planned | Rosalind Franklin | ESA | 310 kg | European landing platform | Solar | Built to be the first rover to drill 2 m down |
From Sojourner to Perseverance, NASA's rovers grew almost a hundredfold, from 10.6 kg to 1,025 kg, and the way down grew with them, from bouncing airbags to a rocket-powered crane.
The Soviet Mars rovers came from a tank institute
The first Mars rovers were designed at an institute built for tanks. VNIITransmash was founded in Leningrad in 1949 to research tracked military vehicles, and from 1963, at Sergei Korolev's initiative, it turned to space, building the self-propelled chassis of the Lunokhod Moon rovers for the Lavochkin design bureau. Lunokhod 1 landed in November 1970; what a space rover is follows the Moon's rovers from there.
PrOP-M reached Mars a year later, built around the problem every Mars rover since has faced: radio signals take minutes to cross between the planets, too long to steer by remote control, so two metal rods let it feel for obstacles and avoid them on its own.
A later Mars rover from the institute never left Earth. Marsokhod, designed for Russia's Mars-96 mission, was dropped from it, and its prototypes went to NASA's Ames Research Center for field tests in the 1990s.
How JPL got from Rocky to Sojourner
Sojourner's line began with a scale model. In the late 1980s JPL was studying a one-tonne rover for a Mars sample-return mission, and Bickler built a one-eighth-scale model of its running gear. David Miller and John Loch then turned that model into Rocky I, the first of four Rocky prototypes before Pathfinder, and a 1992 field demonstration of Rocky IV led NASA to put a rover on Pathfinder.
That rover was Sojourner, built for $25 million by the JPL team Donna Shirley managed, riding a lander that bounced to a stop inside airbags. After landing on 4 July 1997 it rolled down a ramp into Ares Vallis and worked for 83 sols, or Martian days, against a design life of seven, covering about 100 metres. It rode on the first rocker-bogie to leave Earth, and how rocker-bogie suspension works explains why NASA has used the same linkage on every Mars rover since.
How Mars rovers evolved after Sojourner
Spirit and Opportunity: two rovers from one cancellation (2004)
Spirit and Opportunity grew out of a cancelled rover. Squyres's team developed their science payload, Athena, in 1995 for a Discovery mission proposal, then for a large rover on NASA's 2001 Mars lander; cost overruns swapped that rover for a Sojourner spare, and NASA cancelled the lander in May 2000. Later that year NASA picked the Mars Exploration Rover mission: two copies of Athena, each on its own 185 kg rover, about 17 times Sojourner's mass.
The twins landed three weeks apart in January 2004, cushioned by airbags like Pathfinder, on missions planned for 90 sols. Spirit worked for six years. Opportunity lasted more than 14 and drove 45.16 km; where Opportunity explored follows its route across Meridiani Planum.
Curiosity: too heavy for airbags (2012)
At 899 kg, about five times the mass of either twin, Curiosity was too heavy to bounce, so JPL lowered it on cables from a rocket-powered sky crane. JPL's Rob Manning worked on an early sky-crane concept in 2000, and Adam Steltzner led the landing team that made it work. Actuator trouble cost it the 2009 launch window, so it flew in late 2011.
It landed in Gale Crater in August 2012 as the first Mars rover powered by a radioisotope generator, which turns the heat of decaying plutonium-238 into electricity night and day. Jacob Matijevic, a lead engineer on every NASA Mars rover from Sojourner to Curiosity, died two weeks after the landing. The first rock Curiosity touched with its arm, that September, was named Jake Matijevic in his honour.
Perseverance and Zhurong: new ways to land and to walk (2021)
Two rovers landed three months apart in 2021. NASA's Perseverance was built on Curiosity's design, 126 kg heavier, and on 18 February it made the first landing on Mars to use terrain-relative navigation, matching camera images to an onboard map to pick a safe spot in Jezero Crater. It is the first rover to drill rock cores and seal them for a possible trip to Earth, and it carried Ingenuity, the helicopter that made the first powered, controlled flight on another planet on 19 April 2021.
China's Zhurong landed in Utopia Planitia in May and drove off its lander on 22 May, making China the second country to drive a rover on Mars. It was also the first Mars rover with active suspension: Xinhua reported that it could crawl out of a trap like a worm and walk sideways like a crab. After 24 years, the passive rocker-bogie was no longer the only way across Mars.
What is the next Mars rover?
The next rover due on Mars is Europe's Rosalind Franklin, whose history so far is mostly waiting. Planned for 2018, it slipped to 2020 and then 2022, when it was to fly on a Russian rocket to a Russian landing platform; ESA suspended that launch in March 2022, after Russia invaded Ukraine. Rebuilt with a European platform and NASA support, it is due, as of September 2026, to launch in late 2028 and land at Oxia Planum in 2030.
It will be the first rover built to drill two metres down, below the radiation and oxidants that destroy organic material at the surface. Its running gear changes too: three bogies keep six wheels on the ground like a rocker-bogie but with no differential, and ESA's description of the wheels explains how they walk through soft soil.
The next step: a rover with a driver
Every rover that has driven on Mars is a robot steered by plans from Earth. None has carried a person, and NASA's designs for one, covered in what a crewed, pressurized Mars rover would need, have not left Earth.
Mars Rally Championship imagines that vehicle built for speed instead of science. Its only rover is fictional: a 3,000 kg pressurized rally machine, about three times Perseverance's mass, with a 5.0 m body on four knobby tyres, a 90 kWh battery and race number 27 on its doors, driven by a pilot in a pressurized suit. The planet is the real one: 3.72 m/s² of gravity, air at 0.020 kg/m³, and loose regolith on which stopping from 100 km/h takes about 125 metres.
What it leaves out is most of this page. You drive it live, so there is no signal delay and no autonomy; it carries no arm, no science instrument and no radioisotope generator; it rolls on four sprung wheels, not a rocker-bogie's six; and nothing had to land it. The terrain is sculpted to Martian morphologies, not copied from any rover's landing site.
Where to try this
- Free roam has no timer and no checkpoints. Runs start in the HELMET camera by default, at the pilot's eyes; C cycles through the rover's 15 cameras.
- Mars rover size comparison measures every rover in this timeline, and the game's, against a car and a person.
- Mars Rally Championship is free in a browser tab, with no download and no account, on a laptop or a phone held in landscape, and up to eight pilots can race the same stage live.