{"id":13341,"date":"2019-02-13T22:38:18","date_gmt":"2019-02-13T14:38:18","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/wp-productionenv-bjg9h2g2bgg5b8aa.southeastasia-01.azurewebsites.net\/news\/nasa-declares-opportunity-rover-dead-after-15-years-on-mars\/"},"modified":"2019-02-13T22:38:18","modified_gmt":"2019-02-13T14:38:18","slug":"nasa-declares-opportunity-rover-dead-after-15-years-on-mars","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/news\/nasa-declares-opportunity-rover-dead-after-15-years-on-mars\/","title":{"rendered":"NASA declares Opportunity rover dead after 15 years on Mars"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"\"
Opportunity\u2019s front hazard-avoidance camera captured this image of the rover\u2019s shadow July 26, 2004. Credit: NASA\/JPL-Caltech<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Eight months after last hearing from the Opportunity rover, NASA officials announced the end of the craft\u2019s 15-year mission Wednesday, closing out an ambitious chapter of Mars exploration that proved the Red Planet once harbored running water and demonstrated the promise of mobile robotic scouts to survey other worlds.<\/p>\n

The rover succumbed to a sky-darkening global dust storm, and last communicated to Earth on June 10, 2018. Mission officials hoped to regain contact with Opportunity after the dust storm cleared, but daily listening sessions and more than 1,000 tries to send commands to the rover produced no results.<\/p>\n

Thomas Zurbuchen, head of NASA\u2019s science mission directorate, declared the end of Opportunity\u2019s mission in a press conference Wednesday at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California.<\/p>\n

\u201cI was there yesterday, and I was there with the team as these commands went out into the deep sky, and I learned this morning that we had not heard back, and our beloved Opportunity remains silent,\u201d Zurbuchen said. \u201cI am standing here with a sense of deep appreciation and gratitude to declare the Opportunity mission as complete, and with it the Mars Exploration Rover mission as complete.\u201d<\/p>\n

Opportunity landed on Mars on Jan. 24, 2004, to begin a mission that was not planned to last more than 90 days. Instead, Opportunity returned data for more than 14 years \u2014 nearly 60 times longer than its designed lifetime \u2014 and logged more than 28 miles (45 kilometers) on its odometer, farther than any other robot has driven on another world.<\/p>\n

\u201cI have to tell you, this is an emotional time,\u201d Zurbuchen said.<\/p>\n

Opportunity and its twin rover, Spirit, launched in 2003 from Cape Canaveral aboard a pair of Delta 2 rockets. After reaching the Red Planet in January 2004, both of the 384-pound (174-kilogram) rovers \u2014 each about the size of a golf cart \u2014 set out to explore their surroundings, climbing hills and descending into craters in search of geologic clues about the ancient history of Mars.<\/p>\n

Spirit ended its mission in March 2010, after getting stuck in sand with its solar panels in an unfavorable orientation to generate power during a harsh Martian winter.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe were meant to get to this point, to wear these rovers out, to leave behind no unutilized capability on the surface of Mars, but we had no idea it would take this long,\u201d said John Callas, Opportunity\u2019s project manager at JPL. \u201cBut even still, this is a hard day, and this is hard for me because I was there at the beginning.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cSpirit and Opportunity may be gone, but they leave us a legacy, and that\u2019s a legacy of a new paradigm for solar system exploration,\u201d said Mike Watkins, director of JPL. \u201cA robotic geologist on Mars, and an integrated science and engineering (and) operations team here on Earth all set out together on a mission of discovery. They didn\u2019t know what they would find, they didn\u2019t know what direction they would go, sometimes from one day to the next, and they made it work. And they made it work longer than any of us thought possible, by both brilliant scientific deduction of where to go and brilliant engineering to keep the rovers alive.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cIt\u2019s a team that makes success like this,\u201d Zurbuchen said. \u201cIt\u2019s a team that creates exploration, transformative exploration, for science and engineering, and it\u2019s a team that is celebrating here today, emotionally.\u201d<\/p>\n

\"\"
Members of Opportunity\u2019s ground team gathered late Tuesday to send the final commands to the rover in an attempt to restore communications. Credit: NASA\/JPL-Caltech<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Skies over the Opportunity rover blackened last June as a global dust storm enveloped Mars and starved the robot\u2019s solar panels of sunlight. It was the most extreme dust storm observed by Spirit or Opportunity since their landings in 2004.<\/p>\n

Ground controllers regularly listened for a call from Opportunity after losing communications with the rover, using giant dish antennas from NASA\u2019s Deep Space Network to try and detect a signal. Engineers hoped the rover would automatically wake up and radio Earth when the dust storm cleared, but that did not happen. Managers then prepared commands to send up to Opportunity \u201cin the blind,\u201d hoping that a gust of wind would clear the solar panels of dust and bring the robot back to life.<\/p>\n

Opportunity\u2019s ground team sent up the last such command Tuesday night. After the signal took 13-and-a-half minutes to reach Mars \u2014 traveling at the speed of light \u2014 Opportunity should have sent a response back to engineers keeping vigil in a control room at JPL. Silence reigned.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe tried valiantly over these last eight months to try to recover the rover, to get from signal from it,\u201d Callas said Wednesday. \u201cWe\u2019ve listened every single day with the Deep Space Network, with our sensitive receivers, and we sent over 1,000 recovery commands trying to exercise every possibility of getting a signal from the rover. But with time, the skies are darkening, it\u2019s getting colder on Mars, we recently passed through the historic dust-cleaning season on Mars to see if that would help \u2026 That brought us to last night, we sent our final commands, and we heard nothing, so it comes time to say goodbye.\u201d<\/p>\n

NASA spent around $800 million \u2014 in 2003 economic conditions \u2014 to build and launch the Spirit and Opportunity rovers.<\/p>\n

\u201cSpirit and Opportunity were robotic field geologists,\u201d said Steve Squyres, lead scientist for the twin rovers from Cornell University. \u201cGeology is a forensic science. A geologist is like a detective at the scene of a crime. Something happened at this place on Mars billions of years ago. What was it? What was it like there back then? And you\u2019re looking for clues, and the clues are in the rocks. So we equipped these vehicles with the tools that they needed to read those clues.\u201d<\/p>\n

\"\"
Opportunity\u2019s panoramic camera captured this self-portrait on Mars in 2014. Credit: NASA\/JPL-Caltech\/Cornell Univ.\/Arizona State Univ.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

After a six-month journey from launch, Opportunity dropped to an airbag-cushioned landing at Meridiani Planum, a smooth equatorial plain, and rolled into a 72-foot-wide (22-meter) crater, a fortuitous interplanetary \u201chole-in-one\u201d that presented scientists with a treasure trove of layered bedrock exposed by an ancient asteroid impact.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe first day that we landed, it was geologic pay dirt right from the very beginning,\u201d Squyres said.<\/p>\n

\u201cI remember the emotions,\u201d Zurbuchen said. \u201cI saw that Cornell professor (Squyres) jumping up and down like my 4-year-old on his birthday when entry, descent and landing was complete, and the rover said, \u2018I\u2019m here.’\u201d<\/p>\n

Within weeks, Opportunity discovered evidence that liquid water once flowed across the Martian surface at the Eagle Crater site.<\/p>\n

\u201cBut it wasn\u2019t nice stuff,\u201d Squyres said Wednesday. \u201cYou know, we were running around saying, \u2018Water on Mars! Water on Mars!\u2019 It was really sulfuric acid on Mars. The pH was very low, this was very acidic stuff, it was very salty. This was not evidence of an evolutionary paradise, but it was a fascinating, fascinating environment.\u201d<\/p>\n

Opportunity drove to two bigger nearby craters \u2014 Endurance and Victoria \u2014 for an extended mission, then Squyres and his deputies decided to dispatch the rover across a barren stretch of Meridiani Planum, riddled with sand dunes, toward 14-mile-wide (22-kilometer) Endeavour Crater.<\/p>\n

The cross-country trip took three years.<\/p>\n

\"\"
Opportunity\u2019s navigation camera took this image of its tracks on the journey to Endeavor Crater on Aug. 4, 2010. Credit: NASA\/JPL-Caltech<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

\u201cWhen we got there, the mission started all over again,\u201d Squyres said \u201cNew rocks, new stories, looking in the very distant past.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cWe were able, at the rim of Endeavour Crater, to find rocks that were probably the oldest observed by either one of the rovers,\u201d he said. \u201cAnd those told a story of water coursing through the rocks, but with a neutral pH. It was water you could drink, so we were about to piece together a new story there. That was one of the mission\u2019s most significant discoveries, and it came 11 years into our 90-day mission.\u201d<\/p>\n

Opportunity took 217,594 raw images on Mars, nearly double the number captured by Spirit.<\/p>\n

Abigail Fraeman, Opportunity\u2019s deputy project scientist, was a junior in high school when the rover returned the first set of images soon after landing in Eagle Crater. She was at JPL for the landing, thanks to an educational project provided by the Planetary Society.<\/p>\n

\u201cIt was those first images from Opportunity that inspired me to become a planetary scientist,\u201d she said. \u201cThey revealed a view of Mars that we had never seen before.<\/p>\n

\u201cI\u2019ve been hearing a lot of people\u2019s stories,\u201d Fraeman said. \u201cWhat strikes me as so cool is that this story is not unique for me. There really are hundreds, if not thousands, of students who were just like me, who witnessed these rovers and followed along (with) their mission from the images they released to the public over the last 15 years, and because of that went to pursue careers in science, education and math.\u201d<\/p>\n

Callas counted the intergenerational team as \u201cone of the most rewarding legacies\u201d of the Spirit and Opportunity rovers. Scientists and engineers brought up with the Mars rovers will go on to support future space missions, such as the Curiosity rover still exploring Mars, or the Mars 2020 mission set for departure to the Red Planet next year, he said.<\/p>\n

\n

\u201cWe built them for Mars. That\u2019s the place where they were designed to go. That\u2019s their home, that\u2019s where I would like them to stay. Also, if you had the opportunity to bring 180 kilograms of stuff back from the surface of Mars, the last thing I want to bring is something I know exactly what it\u2019s made of,\u201d <\/em>joked Steve Squyres, Mars Exploration Rover principal investigator from Cornell University, in response to a question about retrieving the rovers and returning them to Earth.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

\u201cWhy did these rovers last so long? Why did Opportunity last so long? There are two main technical reasons,\u201d Callas said. \u201cOne is that we had expected that dust falling out of the air would accumulate on the solar arrays and eventually choke off power after about 90 days. But what we didn\u2019t expect that wind would come along periodically and blow the dust off the arrays. This on a seasonal cycle actually became pretty reliable, and allowed us to survive not just the first winter, but all the winters we experienced on Mars, and to keep going and exploring.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe other thing was that these rovers actually have the finest batteries in the solar system,\u201d Callas said. \u201cThey had over 5,000 charge-discharge cycles on them, and they still had about 85 percent of their capacity. I mean, we\u2019d all love it our cell phone batteries lasted this long, but that really was an enabling capability, that with the dust cleaning and the batteries allowed us to have that critical energy that we needed to get through the coldest, darkest parts of the winter on Mars, and to keep exploring.\u201d<\/p>\n

Opportunity suffered from a type of amnesia. A flaw in the rover\u2019s flash memory forced ground controllers to retrieve imagery, science data and housekeeping telemetry before Opportunity went into hibernation every night, then start fresh again the next morning.<\/p>\n

\"\"
Multiple images from the Opportunity rover from June 2018 were stitched together to create this panoramic mosaic, days before the rover\u2019s last contact with Earth. Credit: Credit: NASA\/JPL\/Cornell\/Marco Di Lorenzo\/Ken Kremer<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

\u201cWe had many challenges along the way,\u201d Callas said. \u201cWhen we first landed on Mars, one of the things that happened was we had a heater on the robotic arm on the rover that got stuck on. So every night that heater would come on and waste energy from the rover. If we left it alone like that, the mission wouldn\u2019t have lasted long beyond the 90 days.<\/p>\n

\u201cSo we developed this technique called deep sleep, which is every night we would turn everything off on the rover, including all the survival heaters, and the rover would get cold, but it would stay just warm enough that in the morning when the sun would come up, we would power everything back up,\u201d he said. \u201cIt never got below its allowable temperatures.<\/p>\n

\u201cThis is kind of like if you have a light in your bedroom stuck on, and you can\u2019t sleep, so what you do is you go outside and you turn off the master breaker for your house,\u201d Callas said. \u201cBut that means your refrigerator starts to warm up, but by the morning time when you wake up and you turn the breaker back on, the ice cream hasn\u2019t melted too badly. And you do that every single night. Now imagine doing that for 5,000 nights. That\u2019s what we had to do for this vehicle. But it also, partially perhaps, explains why we weren\u2019t able to recover the rover.<\/p>\n

If the rover\u2019s batteries were fully depleted, its internal clock would have reset.<\/p>\n

\u201cWith a loss of power, the clock in the rover gets scrambled, and it wouldn\u2019t know when to deep sleep,\u201d Callas said. \u201cSo it probably wasn\u2019t sleeping at night when it needed to, and that heater was stuck on, draining away whatever energy the solar arrays were accumulating from the sun to charge those batteries. So that might be part of this explanation, in addition to the fact that now it\u2019s much colder and darker on Mars (as winter approaches).\u201d<\/p>\n

Email the author.<\/i><\/b><\/p>\n

Follow Stephen Clark on Twitter: @StephenClark1.<\/strong><\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Opportunity\u2019s front hazard-avoidance camera captured this image of the rover\u2019s shadow July 26, 2004. Credit: NASA\/JPL-Caltech Eight months after last hearing from the Opportunity rover, NASA officials announced the end of the craft\u2019s 15-year mission Wednesday, closing out an ambitious chapter of Mars exploration that proved the Red Planet once harbored running water and demonstrated […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"inline_featured_image":false,"footnotes":"","_links_to":"","_links_to_target":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[2719,1183,367,190,2721,1561,1563,2723],"class_list":["post-13341","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-news","tag-cornell-university","tag-jet-propulsion-laboratory","tag-mars","tag-nasa","tag-opportunity","tag-planetary-science","tag-solar-system","tag-steve-squyres"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13341"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=13341"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13341\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=13341"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=13341"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=13341"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}