Rover dies after 15-year exploration of Mars
Opportunity, the intrepid NASA rover that spent 15 years on Mars climbing in and out of craters to gather evidence of the planet’s watery past, has been brought down by tiny particles of dust.
It’s a humble ending for a machine that survived a 300 million-mile journey through space, executed a hole-in-one landing, and set a record by driving more than 28 extraterrestrial miles.
Opportunity’s last transmission to Earth occurred on June 10 amid an epic Martian dust storm. Still, NASA engineers remained hopeful that when the dust settled, the rover would recharge its solar-powered batteries and resume its superlative mission. Until Wednesday.
After sending more than 1,000 unanswered commands to the Smart-car-sized vehicle, NASA officials announced that Opportunity’s mission had officially come to an end.
“With a sense of deep appreciation and gratitude, I declare the Opportunity mission is complete,” Thomas Zurbuchen, associate administrator of NASA’s Science Mission Directorate, told a crowd gathered at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in La Canada Flintridge where the mission was built and managed.
Steve Squyres, a planetary scientist at Cornell University and the principal investigator for the Mars Exploration Rover Project, said Opportunity went out like a true veteran.
“It’s like an old-time explorer who sets out over the horizon in the midst of a storm and you never hear from them again,” he said.
Engineers can’t say whether Opportunity’s solar panels are so covered with dust that they can no longer function, or if the rover became so cold in the midst of the dust storm that something inside it snapped — perhaps a joint, a cable or some other critical component.
“It’s likely that we’ll never know,” said John Callas, project manager of NASA’s Mars Exploration Rover mission. “That’s one of the challenges of space exploration.”
Like its twin rover, Spirit, Opportunity was originally designed to last just three months and travel 1,100 yards in the harsh Martian environment.
Instead, it operated more than 60 times longer than planned and sent back more than 17,000 images of the red planet.
“Opportunity has allowed Mars to become a familiar place to us,” Callas said. “For the past 141⁄2 years, a team of people has gone to work on Mars every day. Opportunity made them Martians.”
The two rovers were sent to Mars in the summer of 2003 to look for signs of water in the red planet’s distant past. Data from NASA’s Mars orbiters strongly suggested that water once flowed on the Martian surface, but Spirit and Opportunity were the first to tackle that question from the ground, mission planners said.
Together, they showed that Mars was once a habitable planet — much warmer, wetter and Earth-like than it is today.
“Opportunity and Spirit were trying to read the story in the rocks,” Squyres said.
The two robots touched down on their new home in January 2004, but they were sent to opposite sides of the planet so they could explore very different environments.
Spirit, which developed a reputation as a problem child even before it left Earth, landed in Gusev Crater. That location turned out to be a rocky plane of lava, covered in rubble and difficult to navigate.
It spent six days driving more than a mile to Columbia Hills before it began to make crucial finds about Mars’ potential for harboring life.
Opportunity, on the other hand, started its Martian journey in Meridiani Planum, a possible former lake bed in a giant impact crater. It rolled to a stop in Eagle Crater just 32 feet from where it would make one of the biggest discoveries of the mission: hematite, a mineral that typically forms in water.
“Spirit had to work for everything,” Squyres said. “Opportunity was the lucky one.”
The two rovers were equipped with a suite of tools that allowed them to serve as virtual geologists.
They each had high-resolution color cameras that gave them the equivalent of 20⁄20 vision. Each had a robotic arm with a shoulder, elbow and wrist, allowing them to reach out and examine anything that looked interesting.
Using an infrared spectrometer, they scanned the Martian landscape for rocks and soil that contained minerals that form in water. A microscopic imager gave them the ability to look at the texture of a rock up close and at a very fine scale.