A big welcome to V-STEM’s MARS Explorers
To access our live MARS Rovers contact info@v-stem.com

After a 8 1/2 month journey from Earth our MARS Rovers have finally landed. We need your help getting our MARS Rovers configured ready for there first mission. First learn about the red planet in the “Discover” section.
Earth head quarters can be contacted through your host if you need any Engineering assistance or have any questions.

All about MARS
MARS, named for the Roman god of war, has long been an omen in the night sky. And in its own way, the planet’s rusty red surface tells a story of destruction. Billions of years ago, the fourth planet from the sun could have been mistaken for Earth’s smaller twin, with liquid water on its surface.
Now, the world is a cold, barren desert with few signs of liquid water. With a radius of 2,106 miles, Mars is the seventh largest planet in our solar system and about half the diameter of Earth.

MARS rotates on its axis every 24.6 Earth hours, defining the length of a Martian day, which is called a sol (short for “solar day”). Mars is on average about 50 percent farther from the sun than Earth is, with an average orbital distance of 142 million miles. This means that it takes Mars longer to complete a single orbit, stretching out its year and the lengths of its seasons. On Mars, a year lasts 669.6 sols, or 687 Earth days, and an individual season can last up to 194 sols, or just over 199 Earth days.
MARS is mostly made of carbon dioxide, nitrogen, and argon. Martian breezes can gust up to 60 miles an hour, kicking up dust that fuels huge dust storms and massive fields of sand dunes.

Once upon a time, wind and water flowed across the red planet with lakes and rivers of liquid water coursed across the red planet’s surface. Not so today: Though water ice abounds under the Martian surface and in its polar ice caps, there are no large bodies of liquid water on the surface there today.
Since the 1960s, humans have robotically explored MARS more than any other planet beyond Earth. Currently, eight missions from the U.S., European Union, Russia, and India are actively orbiting MARS or roving across its surface. But getting safely to the red planet is no small feat. Of 45 missions sent to MARS 26 have had some component fail to leave Earth, fall silent en route, miss orbit around Mars, burn up in the atmosphere or crash on the surface.


What is a MARS Rover ?

A MARS rover is a motor vehicle that travels across the surface of the planet MARS upon arrival. Rovers have several advantages over stationary lander: they examine more territory, they can be directed to interesting features, they can place themselves in sunny positions to weather winter months, and they can advance the knowledge of how to perform very remote robotic vehicle control.

What do they do ?
MARS Rovers missions since 1997 have been to search for and characterise a variety of rocks and soils that hold clues to past water activity. In particular, samples sought will include those that have minerals deposited by water-related processes such as precipitation, evaporation and sedimentary. They determine the distribution and composition of minerals, rocks, and soils surrounding the landing sites.

They Perform “ground truth” calibration and validation of surface observations made by Mars orbiter instruments. This will help determine the accuracy and effectiveness of various instruments that survey Martian geology.


MISSION BRIEF – SOL 1, MISSION TIME – 10 Minutes
After a long 8 1/2 month journey your MARS Rover has successfully landed on MARS, you must now run a full system test to check the Rover is functioning correctly using the Task Sheet 1 – System Check List and complete the Daily Laboratory Log to record the environment conditions from the MARS Rover sensors.


Select a MARS Rover by pressing the MARS Rover name button below. When you have finished your mission press the “BACK” button on your web browser.

Now it’s time to get creating

Last updated – 18/11/2021
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