Yesterday was a somewhat emotional day for those who follow current events in space exploration as NASA finally called an end of mission to the Opportunity rover on Mars.
This little machine had been doing its thing on Mars for 15 years, roaming around doing science alongside its twin “Spirit” which reached its own end of mission back in 2010.
The thing about these rovers and why many of us grew so attached, especially to opportunity as it kept on doing its thing, is that they were designed only to last for about 90 days on the surface of Mars. Instead, they just kept going and going and going.
In fact, it took the biggest dust storm ever recorded on Mars to finally take down Opportunity. In the Summer of 2018 atmospheric conditions on mars proved volatile enough to trigger a global dust storm thick enough to block out much of the suns light.
Being a solar powered rover, this meant a cut of power for a longer duration than normal, and it looks like Opportunity didn’t survive. Once the dust had settled NASA had begun attempts to contact the little rover, but were met with no reply, and finally yesterday, after over half a year of trying did they finally give up.
This isn’t uncommon at all – there’s always a chance seasonal changes on Mars could get a dormant machine to “wake up” as parts warm up and more light hits the solar panels, so trying to contact the rover over this time makes sense, but sadly we heard only silence in response.
15 years though, for a machine that was built to do 90 days on a cold desert world. That’s incredible. We grew to love that machine, we made joke comic strips about it never failing, about it eventually taking over the plant even. We felt like it was going to run forever, but at the same rate knew something like this could happen, and when the beginnings of that dust storm formed, we feared it would.
Some might question why we feel sad over a machine, but it was a machine we humanized. The people who built it, controlled it, monitored it, they were a part of it, and it was a part of them. We naturally humanize things, and what better to humanize than a machine which had taught us so much about Mars over 15 years, and even sent back status updates in a human-readable form, in this case its final message being:
“My Battery Is Low And It’s Getting Dark”
Thank you Oppy, for everything you and your sister taught us. Thank you to all the teams behind the design, construction, launch, and operations of these incredible machines, and I guess that’s all I have to say about that. you can, a always, read more about Opportunity at this Wikipedia link.
Yes, I know I’ve been cutting back on writing about Space related subjects, but this was one I couldn’t let go. These entries will still come, but certainly not like they used to.
More to come, as always.