Nasa’s hunt for missed Opportunity
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, a victim of one of the most intense Martian dust storms in decades, which has blocked sunlight from the spacecraft’s solar panels.
The US space agency said yesterday it will issue a final series of recovery commands, on top of more than 1000 already sent. If there is no response by today – which Nasa suspects will be the case – Opportunity will be declared dead, 15 years after arriving on the Red Planet.
Team members are already looking back at Opportunity’s achievements, including confirmation that water once flowed on Mars.
Opportunity was by far the longest-lasting lander on Mars. Besides endurance, the sixwheeled rover set a roaming record of 45 kilometres.
Its identical twin, Spirit, was pronounced dead in 2011, a year after it got stuck in sand and communication ceased.
The golf cart-sized rovers were designed to operate as geologists for just three months, after bouncing on to Mars inside cushioning airbags in January 2004. They were launched a month apart in 2003.
It was no easier saying goodbye to Opportunity than it was to Spirit, project manager John Callas said.
‘‘It’s just like a loved one who’s gone missing, and you keep holding out hope that they will show up and that they’re healthy,’’ he said. ‘‘But each passing day that diminishes, and at some point you have to say ‘enough’ and move on with your life.’’
Unlike Nasa’s nuclearpowered Curiosity rover, which is still chugging along on Mars, Opportunity and Spirit were never designed to endure such weather.
Cornell University’s Steve Squyres, lead scientist for both Opportunity and Spirit, said he considered succumbing to a ferocious storm an ‘‘honourable way’’ for the mission to end.
The rovers’ greatest gift, he said, was providing a geologic record at two distinct places where water once flowed on Mars, and describing the conditions there that may have supported possible ancient life.
Nasa last heard from Opportunity on June 10. Flight controllers tried to awaken the rover, devising and sending command after command, month after month. Engineers speculate that the rover’s internal clock may have become scrambled during the prolonged outage, disrupting its sleep cycle and draining its batteries.
‘‘It’s just like a loved one who’s gone missing.’’