Opportunity Rover Reaches Martian Day 4,000 of Its 90-Day Mission

An anonymous reader writes: Let's take a moment to appreciate the incredible engineering, scientific, and planning skill that went into the construction and deployment of the Opportunity rover. It landed on Mars with the goal of surviving 90 sols (Martian days), and it has just logged its 4,000th sol of harvesting valuable data and sending it back to us. The Planetary Society blog has posted a detailed update on Opportunity's status, and its team's plans for the future. The rover's hardware, though incredibly resilient, is wearing down. They reformatted its flash drive to block off a corrupted sector, and that solved some software problems that had cropped up. They're currently trying to figure out why the rover unexpectedly rebooted itself. Those events are incredibly dangerous to the rover's survival, so their highest priority right now is diagnosing that issue.

Fortunately, weather on Mars is good where the rover is, and it's still able to harvest upwards of 500 Watt-hours of energy from its solar panels. Opportunity recently completed a marathon on Mars and took an impressive picture of the Spirit of St. Louis crater, and the rover will soon be on its way to enormous clay deposits that could provide valuable information about where we can look for water when we eventually put people on Mars. As always, you can look through Opportunity's images at the official website.

Comments

Oblig xkcd

[Anonymous Coward]

https://xkcd.com/1504/

Also appropriate: https://www.xkcd.com/695/

We can do good technology when we have the will

[chipschap]

Here's proof that we are capable of great civilian technology achievements when we have the will and the desire to invest in science and engineering instead of yet another boondoggle.

Re:We can do good technology when we have the will

[MightyMartian]

Yes indeed. Opportunity has to stand as one of NASA's greatest post-Apollo accomplishments.

Re:We can do good technology when we have the will

[Anonymous Coward]

Yes indeed. Opportunity has to stand as one of NASA's greatest post-Apollo accomplishments.

... and at a small fraction of the cost of the F-35 that still isn't certified fit for it's purpose.

It's a hoax!

[wcrowe]

Of course it's lasted more than 90 days. That's because Opportunity never landed on Mars. All the images are created in a secret NASA location in Nevada.

Now if you'll excuse me I have to go monitor the Jade Helm Texas takeover.

Obligatory xkcd

[Chris Mattern]

https://xkcd.com/1504/

He was a lot nicer to Spirit, which had a similarly impressive run:
https://xkcd.com/695/

I'm so light, I can't go on. Oh wait I can.

[SuperKendall]

Pretty sure you are going to need a drink long before low gravity messes with you.

Pretty much all other reasons you list as problems could be applied to a move to Wyoming, but people do that all the time.

I hereby nominate ...

[gstoddart]

I hereby nominate the Mars Rovers for any and all honors which can be shoehorned into being something we can assign to them.

And kudos to the people who built it and kept it going.

Fourty-five times planned mission length is pretty damned awesome!!

Re:The /. groupthink is strongly against manned mi

[Kjella]

Still, I have to point out that this amount of research could have been done by a motorized human in half a day. For a rough estimate, look at the path the rover traveled in these 4000 days:

And the entire project with two rovers and five extensions has cost $944 million. The SLS program will cost tens of billions to develop and even then a launch would eat over half the budget, before you actually have any crew capsule, lander, habitat, return craft or scientific equipment. If you really did an apples-to-apples comparison on the same budget, you'd realize we're getting a very good bang for the buck.

Re:The /. groupthink is strongly against manned mi

[mark-t]

That research could have been collected in a day by a human being, sure.. but not before probably dozens of people died. just trying to get there.

We send probes because they are expendable.

Hmm

[koan]

Personally I think a Martian has taken a liking to it and repairs it while it's sleeping.

Shut up.

[I'm New Around Here]

If you designed something to last for 90 days and it lasts for 4000 you've over-engineered the solution. Time and money could clearly have been saved in the development and construction of the rover.

Just shut up.