Opportunity was designed to run for 90 days, and travel up to 1,100 yards before ending its exploration mission. Instead, the robot endured for nearly 15 years and traveled more than 28-miles before reaching its resting spot on Perseverance Valley. (Image credit: ???)
On July 7, 2003, NASA launched the Opportunity rover to explore the planet Mars. Over six months later, it touched down on Meridiani Planum- a plain located 20 south of the planet’s equator where it began taking photos and analyzing the planet’s geology composition in an effort to find evidence of life. The mission was to last only three months before it was estimated the harsh Martian weather would take its toll on the rover’s hardware (or portions of it) and render it non-functional. Fortunately, it never encountered any catastrophic malfunctions and had its mission extended several times over, where it continued to look for evidence of water and ancient life.
Beyond travel distance and life-span, Opportunity set more notable achievements, including taking more than 217,000 images (15 of them 3600 panoramas), exposed the surfaces of 52 rocks to reveal fresh mineral surfaces for analysis, discovered hematite (a mineral that forms in water), and found strong indicators that clean water (like that of earth) most likely existed during Mar’s ancient period.
The Opportunity rover looks back over its tracks on August 4, 2010. (Image credit: NASA)
Over the years, Opportunity suffered extraterrestrial impediments during its exploration- including losing steering to its front wheels, stuck heaters that severely limited its power, and sand ripples that nearly trapped it for good. In 2015, the rover lost the use of its onboard 256Mb Flash memory, and again had trouble with its front wheels, but each time the robot faced an obstacle, the engineers back on earth were able to devise solutions to get it up and running, and back on the road of exploration.
Then in June of last year, a planet-wide dust storm blanketed its location, and the rover ceased communication with earth. More than 1,000 commands over an 8-month period were made to try and restore contact, which came to no avail. It was thought that the dust storm blanketed the rover’s solar panels, and a windy season would clear them off, thus restoring power and communications, as it’s happened a few times before over the years. Sadly, Opportunity never regained power, with its final message received back in June of last year, which reportedly read- “My battery is low, and it’s getting dark……..”
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