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NASA Making Renewed Efforts To Contact Mars Rover Opportunity (spacenews.com)
NASA is making a new, and perhaps final, attempt to restore contact with the Mars rover Opportunity, which has not communicated with the Earth for more than six months. From a report: The Jet Propulsion Laboratory announced Jan. 25 that it was transmitting a new set of commands to address what it acknowledged are "low-likelihood" events that could have kept the rover from contacting Earth. These new efforts are in addition to the months-long "sweep and beep" campaign of transmitting other commands and listening for a reply from the rover.
The new commands address scenarios where the rover's primary X-band radio has failed or both the primary and backup X-band radios have failed, as well as cases where Opportunity's internal clock has an offset affecting its timing. The commands direct the rover to switch to the backup X-band radio or use its UHF transmitter to contact Earth, as well as resetting its clock. Those scenarios could explain why the rover has failed to contact Earth, but project officials acknowledge that those scenarios are unlikely. "A series of unlikely events would need to have transpired for any one of these faults to occur," JPL noted in the statement about the new campaign.
The new commands address scenarios where the rover's primary X-band radio has failed or both the primary and backup X-band radios have failed, as well as cases where Opportunity's internal clock has an offset affecting its timing. The commands direct the rover to switch to the backup X-band radio or use its UHF transmitter to contact Earth, as well as resetting its clock. Those scenarios could explain why the rover has failed to contact Earth, but project officials acknowledge that those scenarios are unlikely. "A series of unlikely events would need to have transpired for any one of these faults to occur," JPL noted in the statement about the new campaign.
Agreed, the two rovers were well engineered and survived numerous "near misses" along their way that could have shut them down prematurely
I'm not disagreeing with the phenomenal engineering, but in hindsight there is no way that anyone would say were at risk of been shutdown prematurely.
Both Spirit and Opportunity landed on Mars in January of 2004 and were each scheduled for 90 (martian) days (92.5 earth days) missions.
Spirit got stuck on May 1, 2009 and remained so until NASA lost contact with it in May of 2011. That amount of time past it's planned mission would have been amazing if it wasn't for Opportunity making it another 7 years. I just checked the Wikipedia page for Opportunity. It went 14 years, 277 days past it's original planned mission.
It's kind of a shame that the Soviet Lunkhod rovers don't get more recognition. Both were launched over thirty years prior to the MER program. One of those rovers remained functional for over 300 days with late 1960's technology.
Still, the rovers didn't come close to the still functioning Voyager 1 and 2 probes in terms of time or distance. They've both been functioning to some degree for over 40 years now.