Opportunity got an amazing perspective of the Martian surface, sending us back many incredible photos of its geology. Spirit found evidence (in the form of chemicals in rocks) that Mars’s atmosphere was once thicker, possibly indicating the planet used to be more hospitable to life. It also discovered the mineral hematite on the surface, another sign the planet had a wetter past. Opportunity (and Spirit) made some stunning discoveries, including the presence of gypsum, which is formed from mineral-rich water and suggests Mars’s surface once had much more water. Opportunity’s “twin,” a rover named Spirit, which also landed in 2004, stopped operating in 2010. And it’s amazing because Opportunity was only designed with a 90-day mission in mind. That’s the longest amount of time any human-built robot has spent exploring another world. Opportunity lasted 14 years in operation on the surface of Mars, thanks to some engineering tricks like driving the rover backward to compensate for a faulty wheel. It can’t survive temperatures more extreme than minus 40 degrees Fahrenheit without electric heaters.
“Now, Opportunity’s demise is all but certain, as the rover is about to enter Martian winter,” Grush writes. “We have made every reasonable engineering effort to try to recover Opportunity and have determined that the likelihood of receiving a signal is far too low to continue recovery efforts,” John Callas, the manager of NASA’s Mars Exploration Rover project, said in a press statement.Īt The Verge, Loren Grush explains that the dust storm either left too thick a layer of debris on the solar panel or messed up the rover’s internal clock. NASA announced Wednesday that it will not be hearing from the robot ever again. And after the storm cleared, Opportunity - affectionately called “Oppy” - didn’t “wake” back up. The solar-powered rover got trapped in a massive dust storm, which blotted out the sun, its source of energy. Eight months ago, NASA lost contact with the Opportunity rover on Mars, which had been exploring the planet’s surface since 2004.
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