Team Spirit

In 2004, just two months after arriving at Mars, Mars Express flew over NASA’s Spirit rover.

The ESA orbiter sent commands down to the rover, which then sent its data up to the orbiter in the first-ever demonstration of an interagency communications network around another planet.

The commands for the rover first had to be transferred from the Spirit Operations Team at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL), USA, to ESOC in Germany. Here they were translated into commands for Mars Express, then uplinked to the orbiter and sent down to the rover.