The Opportunity rover up on Mars has now reached its 1000th “sol” (or Martian day) of operation. If you’ll recall, Opportunity’s brother Spirit reached the same milestone a few weeks ago.

To celebrate these twin achievements, a multi-media producer and rover enthusiast named Doug Ellison has created a pair of posters that he sent as gifts to the rover teams at Cornell University and the Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL). The posters are mosaics composed of images taken by the rovers themselves, and they’re pretty cool. Emily over at The Planetary Society has the details; you can see the Spirit poster here, and the Opportunity poster is here.

Not all of today’s news from the Red Planet is happy, though: the Mars Global Surveyor (MGS), yet another of our intrepid robot proxies, has vanished. Mission controllers haven’t heard from the spacecraft since November 5. They are hopeful that the MSG is still operational and has simply oriented itself at an angle that makes communication difficult (i.e., the antenna is turned away from Earth). Plans are afoot to try and spot the missing spacecraft with the cameras on board the Mars Reconaissance Orbiter (that’s the one that photographed the Opportunity rover a while back) and then to use the rovers to relay a signal to the MGS. For more information, check out the Planetary Society’s complete article.