Opportunity honorably discharged
NASA’s Opportunity rover, which spent nearly 15 years snapping photos of Mars and “phoning home” with data, is relieved of duty after going silent in June.
The longest-lived robot ever sent from Earth to the surface of another planet, Opportunity snapped pictures of a strange landscape and revealed surprising glimpses into the distant past of Mars for more than 14 years. But on Wednesday, NASA announced that the rover is dead.
“It is therefore that I am standing here with a deep sense of appreciation and gratitude that I declare the Opportunity mission is complete,” said Thomas Zurbuchen, NASA’s associate administrator for science.
For the scientists, that ends a mission of unexpected endurance. The rover was designed to last only three months. Opportunity provided scientists a close-up view of Mars that they had never seen: finely layered rocks that preserved ripples of flowing water several billion years ago, a prerequisite for life.
The steady stream of photographs and data from Opportunity — as well as its twin, Spirit, which survived until 2010 — also brought Mars closer to people on Earth. Because the rovers continued so much longer than expected, NASA has now had a continuous robotic presence on Mars for more than 15 years.
That streak seems likely to continue for many more years. A larger, more capable rover, Curiosity, arrived in 2012, and NASA is planning to launch another in 2020.
“Rovers and their observations resonate with people,” said Raymond E. Arvidson, a professor of planetary geology at Washington University in St. Louis and the deputy principal investigator for the mission. “It’s as if you were walking on the surface. It has that kind of perspective, and it’s not a particularly alien landscape.”
On Tuesday night, NASA made one last call to Opportunity, which was silenced last summer by a giant dust storm. There was no answer.
“It was an incredibly somber moment,” said Tanya Harrison, a member of the mission’s science team who was present in Pasadena, Calif., at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory during the final attempt to reach the rover. “Just waiting for the inevitable, basically.”
The rover has been quiet since June. During the dust storm, Opportunity’s solar panels could not generate enough power to keep the spacecraft awake.
NASA had hoped that once the skies cleared, the rover would revive to continue its work. But as time passed, it became more likely that the mission was finally over.
Opportunity landed on Mars on Jan. 24, 2004, three weeks after its twin, Spirit, which set down on the opposite side of the planet.
In 2009, Spirit slipped into a sand trap and could not pull itself out. It stopped communicating in March 2010, unable to survive the Martian winter.
NASA’s Curiosity rover, which landed in 2012, continues to explore another part of Mars, a crater that was once filled with water. In addition to NASA, China and a joint European-Russian collaboration are also planning to send rovers to Mars in 2020.