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.
Opportunity is survived by the Curiosity rover and the InSight lander, both on Mars, as well as by the yet-unnamed “Mars 2020” rover, set to launch next July.
Government projects tend to come in behind schedule and over-budget. “Oppy” was a beloved exception.
Arriving on Mars on Jan. 24, 2004, seven months after launch from Cape Canaveral, Fla., Opportunity was designed to last just 90 Martian days and travel a total distance of 1,100 yards. (Martian days are about 40 minutes longer than ours.) Instead, the golf-cart sized rover out-lasted two presidents and the entire series run of “How I Met Your Mother” (2005-2014), exceeding its life expectancy by 60 times. Opportunity explored the Red Planet for the better part of 14 years, traveling over 28 miles and sending more than 217,000 images back to Earth. In comparison, its twin rover, Spirit, which arrived on the red planet 20 days before Opportunity, traveled roughly 5 miles before dying in May 2011.
The rovers’ primary objective was to seek evidence of water on Mars, to help determine if the planet’s climate may have once been able to sustain life. “From the get-go, Opportunity delivered,” said Steve Squyres, principal investigator of the rovers’ science payload at Cornell University. Its discoveries, and those of Spirit, revealed “compelling evidence” for the existence of liquid water, both at surface level and below, during Mars’ ancient past.
A team of engineers, drivers, and scientists managed and operated Opportunity remotely from Earth, collaborating to “overcome challenges and get the rover from one geologic site on Mars to the next,” the JPL explained. “They plotted workable avenues over rugged terrain so that the 384-pound…Martian explorer could maneuver around and, at times, over rocks and boulders, climb gravel-strewn slopes as steep as 32-degrees (an off-Earth record), probe crater floors, summit hills, and traverse possible dry riverbeds.”
One of the rover team’s greatest challenges came in April 2005, when Opportunity looked to be thwarted by a treacherous Martian sand-ripple (when sand is pulled by surface air or water into shallow dune-like formations). Traveling across Mars’ Meridiani Planum region, Opportunity became mired in the ripple, later dubbed the “Purgatory Dune,” after all six of its wheels dug roughly four-inches deep into the soft, wind-blown dust and sand. If this doesn’t sound sufficiently daunting, imagine trying to drive a remote-controlled car out of a St. Andrews’ bunker made of Fire Swamp quicksand. After more than five nerve-wracking weeks of planning, mapping, and testing, not to mention assiduous, incremental driving, the Opportunity team managed to extricate the rover from the hazard in early June 2005. To my knowledge, the escape holds the record for the longest-distance roadside-assistance operation ever. (Eat your heart out, AAA.)
The Purgatory Dune was far from its only extraterrestrial test. The same year, Opportunity lost steering in one of its front wheels and suffered a heater issue that nearly crippled its total solar-power capacity. In 2007, it weathered a dust storm that raged for two months. Eventually, the years and miles did begin to take their toll. In 2015, the JPL reports that Oppy lost use of its 256-megabyte flash memory; two years later, it lost steering for its other front wheel. Nevertheless, the intrepid rover-that-could soldiered on, battered and bruised, until ultimately succumbing to the dust in June 2018.
To call Opportunity’s mission a success is to do the crew and the craft a disservice. The enterprise is a tremendous scientific and technical achievement, conceived in the indelible spirit of American exploration and innovation, representing the great virtues of noble human effort. Opportunity was American exceptionalism made manifest, and be it providence or coincidence, it’s only appropriate the rover found its final resting place in the western arm of Mars’ Perseverance Valley.
Farewell, Oppy, your nation salutes you.
J. Grant Addison is deputy editor of the Washington Examiner Magazine.
