NASA Bids Farewell To 'Opportunity': A Peek Into The Robot's 14-Year-Long Journey On Mars
ET Bureau|
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Adieu, Opportunity
NASA recently said goodbye to robot geologist Opportunity after a Marswide dust storm put an end to its successful and enduring feats of interplanetary exploration. Check out a few glimpses of its extraterrestrial travel that’s more than the distance of a marathon on the Red Planet.
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Opportunity Was A Twin
An artist’s concept portrays a NASA Mars Exploration Rover on the surface of Mars. The two identical, golf-cartsized, solar-powered rovers: Spirit and Opportunity were launched in 2003 and landed on Mars in January 2004. Each rover was built to have the mobility and toolkit for functioning as a robotic geologist.
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Scientific Discovery
Opportunity and Spirit showed that the Red Planet had the wet and warm conditions in its ancient past that were potentially hospitable to life. The picture below was taken during the 84th Martian day, or sol, of the rover’s work on Mars (April 19, 2004).
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An Off-World Record Holder
Opportunity worked longer on the surface of Mars than any other robot — more than 14 years. This far exceeded the original 90-day mission planned for Opportunity and Spirit. This image was taken by Opportunity using its panoramic camera to record the eastward horizon view on the 2,407th Martian day on Mars (October 31, 2010).
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An Off-World Record Holder
Opportunity worked longer on the surface of Mars than any other robot — more than 14 years. This far exceeded the original 90-day mission planned for Opportunity and Spirit. This image was taken by Opportunity using its panoramic camera to record the eastward horizon view on the 2,407th Martian day on Mars (October 31, 2010).
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Showed The Beauty Of Mars
Opportunity was an avid documentarian, which gave us a human-scale view of what it was like to be on Mars. Together with Spirit, it returned over 342,000 raw images. The two rovers also produced 31 360-degree colour panoramas. On the seventh anniversary of its landing on Mars, Opportunity sent this colour panorama of Santa Maria Crater.
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The Calm After A Storm
The rover last communicated with Earth on June 10, 2018, as a planet-wide dust storm blanketed the solar-powered rover’s location on Mars. After the storm abated, more than 835 recovery commands were sent to Opportunity, but the rover stopped communicating with Earth since then. According to NASA, it likely experienced a low-power fault, a mission clock fault and an up-loss timer fault.
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It's Not Over
The success of the Mars Exploration Rovers (Opportunity and Spirit) helped drive the growth of NASA’s Mars program, building support for orbiters and new kinds of rovers. Scientists will continue to make new discoveries from the Mars Exploration Rovers data for years to come. In this navigation camera RAW image, Opportunity looks back over its own tracks.
