Nasa set to say goodbye to Opportunity on Mars

Nasa is trying one last time to contact its record-setting Mars rover Opportunity before calling it quits.

The rover has been silent for eight months, victim of one of the most intense dust storms in decades. Thick dust darkened the sky last year and, for months, blocked sunlight from the spacecraft’s solar panels.

Nasa said yesterday it will issue a final series of recovery commands, on top of more than 1000 already sent. If there’s no response by today — which Nasa suspects will be the case — Opportunity will be declared dead, 15 years after arriving at the red planet.

Team members are already looking back at Opportunity’s achievements, including confirmation water once flowed on Mars. Opportunity was, by far, the longest-lasting lander on Mars. Besides endurance, the sixwheeled rover set a roaming record 45km. Its identical twin, Spirit, was pronounced dead in 2011, a year after it got stuck in sand and communication ceased.

Both outlived and outperformed expectations, on opposite sides of Mars. The golf cart-size rovers were designed to operate as geologists for just three months, after bouncing onto our planetary neighbour inside cushioning air bags in January 2004. They rocketed from Cape Canaveral a month apart in 2003.

Now it’s up to the rover Curiosity and the newly arrived InSight lander to carry on the work.