Before Curiosity and Perseverance, two now-defunct NASA rovers paved the way for the machines that explore the red planet today: Spirit and Opportunity. While Curiosity and Perseverance are each roughly the size of a small car and have sophisticated instruments like spectrographs with lasers to break down materials for analysis on board, Spirit and Opportunity were smaller and simpler. Still, they were at the forefront of the last few decades of exploration of Mars, and the two recently celebrated
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