Expedition Mars: Spirit & Odyssey

Release Date: April 11, 2017

Watch Date: May 1 – May 3, 2025

“Expedition Mars brings to life one of the greatest sagas of the space age – the epic adventures of the Mars rovers Spirit and Opportunity. Expected to last only a few months, the mighty rovers lasted for years, climbing crater walls and surviving dust storms, frigid nights, and broken wheels. Intrepid explorers, they reinvigorated NASA’s Mars program and opened the Martian frontier.”

It’s May-Be Learn Some Shit Month! Which has, unironically, become our most anticipated month of the year. We’re sad when it goes. We’re sad when we don’t watch enough NatGeo documentaries in the month, and Bob and I both look forward to it like it’s Christmas. We basically had a countdown the last two weeks of my birthday month leading up to May. We might be a little lame, but at least we entertain ourselves.

This documentary gives a really good overview of the Spirit and Odyssey rover missions, going from the planning stages to the last days of the rover. And it’s actually pretty amazing. The CGI is dated, sure, but it helps to create a para-social bond between you and the robot, just like the scientists got too!

Seriously, we’ve lived through this history and Bob actually keeps quite up to date on the current rovers, and even he held his breath every storm, every unexpected bump, every sand trap. I can’t imagine what it must’ve been like to have actually worked with those robots for as long as they did.

So with all that in mind, it’s gonna be a lot of old footage and bad CGI but if you are in anyway interested in the science of robotics, geology, or space exploration, than this is the NatGeo documentary for you. If all of that sounds boring…watch it anyways. These little rovers roam Mars so that man might one day, and they need all the support years after they cease functioning that they can get.