Goodbye Opportunity
Top Space News – February 2019
February 15, 2019
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March 1, 2019
On Feb 13, 2019, NASA mission engineers have decided that all further efforts to revive the Opportunity, the space agency’s most durable Mars rover, must come to an end and we must say goodbye to Opportunity.
NASA’s Mars Rover Opportunity Concludes a 15-Year Mission
Opportunity Mars Exploration Rover
The $400 million Opportunity Mars rover managed to maintain an incredible 15-year long mission. The 400-pound robot rover originally was only designed for 90 days of operations, which it amazingly had outlasted computer malfunctions, wind storms, and agency budget battles to survive on Mars for more than 14 years.
Carrying three spectrometers, three cameras, a microscope, and a rock hammer, the Opportunity Mars rover was a robotic working field geologist, studying rocks and collecting minerals in its path.
The Greatest Findings of the Opportunity
- Deposits of hematite and gypsum that could have formed in hot springs or running water.
- An iron-nickel meteorite near its own discarded heat shield—the first meteorite ever identified on another planet.
- Evidence that persuaded scientists the arid plains of Mars had once been awash with acidic water, although it found no signs that life ever existed on the planet.
- Setting a record for extraterrestrial ground travel.
- Recorded hundreds of thousands of images and transmitted them to eager researchers on Earth. They included breathtaking panoramas of Martian craters and a picture of a swirling Martian dust devil.
- The summer of 2018, Opportunity had reached a location that NASA mission engineers dubbed Perseverance Valley. There Opportunity made its final stand. Due to a massive dust storm, however, in that dust storm, the solar panels that power the craft became covered in dust. The rover had weathered a previous storm in 2007, but this one, unfortunately, overwhelmed it. The Opportunity has been crawling across the surface of Mars since 2012, and it was plutonium-powered and amazingly it wasn’t affected.
Agency engineers decided it was best to now finish the mission because the seasonal winds that might clear the dust from the rover’s solar panels are dying down for the year and the bitter cold of approaching winter is likely to severely damage the rover’s unheated batteries and electric systems.
John Callas, Mars Exploration Rover project manager: “We were meant to wear these rovers out, We had no idea it would take this long. Even so, this is a hard day. Even though it is a machine, we have to say goodbye.”
It is time to say goodbye to one of the best Mars rovers in history. AstroReality MARS AR Notebook gives you the chance to meet with the Mars rovers in the Martian landscape using Augmented Reality technology. Open the notebook to wake up Ares, and see the gorgeous job made by the Opportunity.
Opportunity Martian Rover in AstroReality AR App
