Mars Rovers
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49 free Mars Rovers trivia questions with answers — science & nature quiz, new questions added Sep 2026.
Six rovers have driven on Mars, and every one of them has a story. Sojourner was a 10-kilogram experiment that was supposed to last a week in 1997 and spent three months sniffing rocks named after cartoon characters. Spirit and Opportunity were built for 90 days and lasted six and fourteen years. Curiosity arrived under a rocket-powered sky crane, and Perseverance brought a helicopter and a parachute with a secret message stitched into it. These 49 questions cover all of them, plus China's Zhurong and the tiny Soviet ski-rovers of 1971. You will meet the schoolchildren who named each NASA rover, the landing sites renamed for lost shuttle crews and a science-fiction author, the Morse code hidden in Curiosity's tyre tracks, the oxygen experiment, the rock with leopard spots, and the Tolkien-themed hills where Ingenuity finally came to rest. Easy questions stick to landing sites and famous moments; the expert tier goes to software bugs, flight spares in the Smithsonian and wind-powered tumbleweed concepts. Every answer is cited and explained.
30 of 49 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01Sojourner, the first rover to drive on Mars, arrived in 1997 as part of which NASA mission?
Mars Pathfinder
Mars Pathfinder's rover was planned to work for seven sols but kept going for 83, until the lander fell silent in September 1997.
Q 02Sojourner was named after Sojourner Truth, who was what?
An abolitionist
An abolitionist who freed herself from slavery in 1826, she took the name Sojourner Truth in 1843 because she felt called to travel and preach.
Q 03What cushioned Sojourner's lander when it hit the Martian surface in 1997?
Giant airbags
Giant airbags wrapped the lander, which bounced at least 15 times before rolling to a stop, and NASA reused the same airbag design for Spirit and Opportunity.
Q 04After landing, Sojourner's lander was renamed in honour of which astronomer?
Carl Sagan
Carl Sagan, who died in December 1996, had pushed NASA to turn Voyager 1's camera around for one last, famous photo of distant Earth.
Q 05Rocks at Sojourner's landing site were named after what?
Cartoon characters
Cartoon characters lent their names to rocks such as Scooby Doo and Casper, and a big boulder became Yogi because it looked like a bear.
Q 06Sojourner relied on its lander for what?
Talking to Earth
Talking to Earth: the lander relayed its data, and while driving, Sojourner traded 'heartbeat' signals with the lander at each stop before moving on.
Q 07Sojourner's identical flight spare, later given to the Smithsonian, is named after whom?
Marie Curie
Marie Curie copied Sojourner's moves in a Mars-like test area during the mission, and NASA later planned to send it on a 2001 Mars mission that never flew.
Q 08What is the name of the six-wheel suspension first flown on Sojourner and reused on later rovers?
Rocker-bogie
Rocker-bogie joints use no springs, so all six wheels stay pressed to the ground while the rover climbs over rocks as big as one of its wheels.
Q 09How did engineers stop the computer resets on Sojourner's lander?
A software patch from Earth
A software patch from Earth did it: engineers recreated the priority-inversion bug on a lab replica, then uploaded a short program that switched on priority inheritance.
Q 10Sojourner's landing site, Ares Vallis, holds rocks swept there by what?
A flood
A flood huge enough to carve one of Mars's largest outflow channels left a wide variety of rocks at Ares Vallis, one reason scientists chose the site.
Q 11Spirit landed in January 2004 inside which impact crater?
Gusev
Gusev was chosen as the landing site because it looked like an old crater lakebed, with the long Ma'adim Vallis channel running into it.
Q 12Spirit's landing site was named as a memorial to the crew of which spacecraft?
Columbia
Columbia broke apart on 1 February 2003, and Spirit later climbed Husband Hill, one of seven nearby hills named after the shuttle's crew.
Q 13Built for 90 sols, how long did Opportunity keep exploring?
15 years
Almost 15 years: a rover designed to drive just 1,000 metres ended up covering more than 45 km across Mars.
Q 21The pattern of holes in Curiosity's wheels spells out JPL in which code?
Morse code
Morse code: the dots and dashes spell JPL, the lab that built the rover, and the tracks they leave let its cameras measure how far it has driven.
Q 22What silenced Opportunity in June 2018?
A planet-wide dust storm
A planet-wide dust storm blotted out the sunlight the solar-powered rover needed, and Opportunity never answered the more than 1,000 signals sent to wake it.
Q 23Who actually wrote "My battery is low and it's getting dark", credited to Opportunity?
A journalist paraphrasing NASA data
Q 14When NASA couldn't free Spirit from soft sand, what did it turn the rover into?
A stationary science platform
A stationary science platform: stuck in place, Spirit began tracking tiny wobbles in Mars's rotation to learn whether the planet's core is liquid or solid.
Q 15Spirit's broken front wheel, dragged through the soil, uncovered silica that likely formed in what?
Hot springs
Hot springs or steam vents likely made the nearly pure silica, strong evidence that ancient Mars was much wetter than it is today.
Q 16Both Spirit and Opportunity carry metal salvaged from where?
The World Trade Center
The pieces were turned into shields protecting cables on the drilling tools.
Q 17Opportunity landed on which Martian plain?
Meridiani Planum
Meridiani Planum won the landing because orbiters had mapped hematite there, a mineral NASA took as a sign that liquid water once flowed.
Q 18What is thought to have cleared dust off the solar panels of NASA's Spirit and Opportunity rovers?
Gusts of wind
Gusts of wind are the likely cleaners, and each clean sweep pushed the rovers' solar power back up.
Q 19Opportunity found the ground strewn with tiny hematite balls that NASA scientists nicknamed after which fruit?
Blueberries
Blueberries was the team's name for them, even though the little hematite balls are grey, and they covered the rover's landing plain in huge numbers.
Q 20In 2014, Opportunity broke the off-world driving record set in 1973 by a Soviet rover on which world?
The Moon
The Moon: Lunokhod 2 had held the off-Earth driving record since 1973, until Opportunity passed it in July 2014 after about 40 km.
A journalist paraphrasing NASA data, Jacob Margolis, tweeted the line in February 2019, and it spread so widely that he wrote an article explaining the rover never said it.
Q 24What did the rock Opportunity found beside its discarded heat shield turn out to be?
A meteorite
A meteorite: it is mostly iron and nickel, so it likely came from the metal core of a small planet that was later smashed apart.
Q 25Which crater did Opportunity reach in 2011 and treat as a "second landing site"?
Endeavour
Endeavour, 22 km wide, was worth a drive of nearly three years because orbiters had spotted clay minerals along its rim.
Q 26Curiosity landed in August 2012 inside which crater?
Gale
Gale was chosen because its rocks held clays and sulfates that form in water, and Curiosity soon found evidence that Mars once had habitable environments.
Q 27Curiosity's touchdown spot on Mars was named after which author?
Ray Bradbury
Ray Bradbury had died that June, and NASA's Michael Meyer said many on the team were inspired by his stories to dream of life on Mars.
Q 28A calibration target for Curiosity's close-up camera includes which old American coin?
A Lincoln penny
A Lincoln penny from 1909 sits on the target, a nod to the geologists' habit of putting a coin in close-up rock photos to show scale.
Q 29Curiosity is powered by the decay of which isotope?
Plutonium-238
Plutonium-238's decay heat gives Curiosity power day and night whatever the weather, and spare heat is piped around to keep the rover's systems warm.
Q 30Curiosity was lowered to the Martian surface on nylon cords from what?
A sky crane
A sky crane, a rocket-powered descent stage, hovered while it lowered the rover on cords, then cut them and flew off to crash-land on its own.