Goodbye, Opportunity

NASA bid adieu to its 'Opportunity' Mars exploration rover on 13 February, 2019. The rover, which was planned to function for 92.5 days, managed to operate for more than 15 years. In addition to exceeding its life expectancy by 60 times, the rover traveled more than 45 kilometers on the surface of Mars by the time it reached its most appropriate final resting spot on the planet — the Perseverance Valley.

An artistic rendition of the Opportunity rover on the surface of Mars

Here are some of the major achievements of the Opportunity rover:

• The rover set a one-day Mars driving record March 20, 2005, when it traveled 721 feet (220 meters).
• It returned more than 217,000 images, including 15 360-degree color panoramas.
• It exposed the surfaces of 52 rocks to reveal fresh mineral surfaces for analysis and cleared 72 additional targets with a brush to prepare them for inspection with spectrometers and a microscopic-imager.
• It found hematite, a mineral that forms in water, at its landing site.
• At Endeavour Crater, it discovered strong indications of the action of ancient water similar to the drinkable water of a pond or lake on Earth.

(Source: https://mars.nasa.gov/)

All these accomplishments were not without the occasional extraterrestrial intervention. In 2005, Opportunity lost steering to one of its front wheels. A stuck heater threatened to severely limit the rover's available power and a Martian sand ripple almost trapped it for good. Two years later, a two-month dust storm imperiled the rover. In 2015, Opportunity lost use of its 256-megabyte flash memory and in 2017, it lost steering to its other front wheel.

A relevant XKCD.

Each time the rover faced an obstacle, Opportunity's team on Earth found and implemented a solution that enabled the rover to bounce back. However, the massive dust storm that took shape in the summer of 2018 proved too much for history's most senior Mars explorer.

Opportunity ceased communications on June 10, 2018 and entered hibernation a couple days later. It was hoped that the rover would reboot once the weather cleared but it did not, suggesting either a catastrophic failure or that a layer of dust had covered its solar panels. NASA hoped to re-establish contact with the rover, citing a windy period that could potentially clean off the solar panels of the rover. On February 13, 2019, NASA officials declared that the Opportunity mission was complete, after the spacecraft failed to respond to repeated signals sent since August 2018.

"My battery is low and it's getting dark."

 -Opportunity's last message received in June, 2018.

The Bottom Line

The Opportunity rover far exceeded everyone's expectations by surviving on Mars' unforgiving terrain for more than 15 years. It gave way to countless scientific explorations and phenomenal discoveries on Mars. It is the technical legacy of Opportunity which is carried aboard Curiosity and the upcoming Mars 2020 mission rovers. Over at the Reddit thread, u/seshelton commented on how Opportunity is the 'ultimate example of “undersell and over-deliver”'.

It is hoped that Opportunity comes back to life one day like the Oscar 7 satellite, which died in 1981 and was nearly forgotten about when it suddenly came back to life and started transmitting again 21 years after it was seemingly dead forever.

"Farewell, Opportunity, and well done."

-John L. Callas, project manager of NASA's Mars Exploration Rover project.

That's it for today, everyone. Before leaving this page, please consider checking out this link to send a postcard to Opportunity.

Thank you for reading and have a great day ahead!

-Ritin Malhotra