Contact was lost fourteen months ago with the Mars rover Spirit. This week, NASA gave up on giving further instrucions to it after seven years.

From now on, NASA focuses on Spirit's still-active twin, Opportunity. This marks the completion of one of the most successful missions of interplanetary exploration ever launched.

Spirit and Opportunity landed on Mars in 2014. Originally their mission was planned for three months. In the end, Spirit served for seven years on the red planet. Contact was lost with the rover on the 22nd of March, 2010 with the arrival of the Martian winter. Although NASA hoped that spring would recover the Spirit, mission control failed to get in touch with it. Spirit was frozen to death while revealing the Gusev-crater.

Spirit drove almost eight kilometers, more than 12 times the goal set for the mission. It became the first robot to summit a hill on another planet. The rover returned more than 124,000 images.