America bid farewell to an old, trusty friend this month as NASA closed the book on the record-setting Mars Opportunity rover, officially declaring an end to its nearly 15 years of exploration on Wednesday, Feb. 13.
Opportunity had ceased communication with Earth following a severe, planet-wide dust storm that buffeted Mars in June 2018, blanketing the solar-powered rover. In the intervening months, more than a thousand attempts were made to contact the dormant rover, according to NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL), but to no avail. Engineers in NASA’s Space Flight Operations Facility in Pasadena, Calif., made one final attempt to revive Opportunity on Feb. 12, but it, too, failed.
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