Formal notices issued by the Office.

This office has recorded a vehicle registered to your agency parked on private property in Gale Crater since August 6, 2012. No permit is on file. No request for one was ever received.

In the years since, the vehicle has (1) drilled into the property on dozens of occasions, (2) driven many kilometers across it, (3) begun climbing Aeolis Mons, a mountain your agency refers to as "Mount Sharp" without having consulted the owner, and (4) repeatedly photographed itself on the property.

Please arrange for the vehicle's removal, or submit a permit application with fees for the full period of occupancy. Parking fees continue to accrue at the standard daily rate. The Office will provide the standard daily rate once the Office has decided what it is.

The Office further requests that you stop calling it Mount Sharp.

Your vehicle Perseverance has been observed drilling cores out of the property, sealing them in metal tubes, and retaining them for export. This constitutes the removal of material from private property, prohibited under Property Rule 5.

The Office has also noted that ten of these tubes were set down on the crater floor between December 2022 and January 2023, to await collection by a separate mission. The Office has not been told when that mission will arrive. Based on public reporting, neither has anyone else.

The property is not a package locker. Please either collect the tubes or return their contents to the holes they came from. The Office is aware the second option is impractical. It is included for completeness.

Between April 2021 and January 2024, an aircraft operated by your laboratory conducted 72 flights over private property without a license, flight plan, or notice to the owner. The aircraft photographed the property from the air on nearly every flight, including one flight in which it photographed your own discarded parachute and backshell.

Here on Earth, a drone flown over a neighbor's property 72 times would be a matter for the local sheriff. Mars does not have a sheriff. It has this office.

The Office acknowledges that the aircraft is now grounded following rotor damage. The Office is not requesting its return. The Office is requesting that you come and get it.

Your rover Zhurong entered the property in May 2021 and began driving without a permit. In May 2022 it entered hibernation to wait out the Martian winter. The winter has ended. It has since ended again.

Hibernation is not a recognized form of occupancy under the Property Rules. A vehicle that has not moved in several years is, under Rule 3, a parked vehicle. A parked vehicle that has not moved in several years is, under the same rule, abandoned.

If the rover is merely sleeping, please wake it and remove it. If it is not merely sleeping, the Office offers its sympathies and still requests its removal.

On October 19, 2016, your lander Schiaparelli entered the property and struck it at high speed, leaving a new crater and a debris field consisting of a parachute, a backshell, a heat shield, and the lander. The Office understands that a software fault led the lander to conclude it had already landed. It had not.

The Office has also received notice of your agency's intention to send a rover, Rosalind Franklin, to the property in the coming years. That application is under review. Given the outcome of the previous entry, review may take some time.

Please remove the debris. The crater may stay. The Office has grown used to it.

The Office writes to your agency as successor to the Soviet space program regarding the three earliest recorded unauthorized entries onto the property.

Mars 2 struck the property on November 27, 1971, making it the first human-made object ever to reach the surface. Mars 3 landed five days later, transmitted for about twenty seconds, and has not been heard from since. Mars 6 was lost during descent in 1974.

Your predecessor holds the record for the first trespass on the property. The Office does not issue awards. If it did, this would not be one.

This letter is issued on the seventh anniversary of the day your agency declared Opportunity's mission complete.

Opportunity entered the property without a permit in January 2004. It was designed to last 90 sols. It lasted more than 5,000. It drove 45 kilometers, farther than any vehicle had driven on any world other than Earth at the time. It found evidence that water once moved through the property, which the owner had not known. It was last heard from in June 2018, in the middle of a dust storm that covered the planet.

Opportunity was a trespasser. The Office wishes to state, for the record, that it was also a very good one.

No fees will be assessed. The vehicle may remain where it is.

The Office has followed with interest the public announcements, by several private companies and individuals, of plans to land crewed vehicles on the property and establish permanent cities there.

No zoning application has been received for any of these developments.

A city requires zoning. Zoning requires the owner. The owner is reachable through the report form on this website, under the category "Lease or access inquiry."