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NASA's Mars Rover Opportunity Concludes a 15-Year Mission (nytimes.com)
For more than 14 years, the Opportunity rover crawled up and down craters, snapped pictures of a strange landscape and revealed surprising glimpses into the distant past of Mars. On Wednesday, NASA announced that Opportunity, the longest-lived robot ever sent from Earth to the surface of another planet, is dead. The New York Times: "It is therefore that I am standing here with a deep sense of appreciation and gratitude that I declare the Opportunity mission is complete," said Thomas Zurbuchen, NASA's associate administrator for science. That ends a mission of unexpected endurance: it was designed to last only three months. Opportunity provided scientists a close-up view of Mars that they had never seen: finely layered rocks that preserved ripples of flowing water several billion years ago, a prerequisite for life.
The steady stream of photographs and data from Opportunity -- as well as its twin, Spirit, which survived until 2010 -- also brought Mars closer to people on Earth. Because the rovers continued so much longer than expected, NASA has now had a continuous robotic presence on Mars for more than 15 years. That streak seems likely to continue for many more years. A larger, more capable rover, Curiosity, arrived in 2012, and NASA is planning to launch another in 2020. Live telecast here.
The steady stream of photographs and data from Opportunity -- as well as its twin, Spirit, which survived until 2010 -- also brought Mars closer to people on Earth. Because the rovers continued so much longer than expected, NASA has now had a continuous robotic presence on Mars for more than 15 years. That streak seems likely to continue for many more years. A larger, more capable rover, Curiosity, arrived in 2012, and NASA is planning to launch another in 2020. Live telecast here.
Great job by everybody involved - I'm sure if it wasn't for the big dust storm, it would still be working and sending back new discoveries.
Mimetics Inc. Twitter
Obligatory xkcd about its twin: Spirit. We learned a lot from these machines. I hope Matt Damon can one day use one of them to phone home.
I am not interested in articles about life extension advancements.
NASA tried to use the last bit of energy in the Opportunity's batteries to gently knock the rover into a nearby rock to attempt to knock loose some of the dust on the solar panels that was limiting the solar charging. It worked a little bit, and they were going to try it again for more improvement, but they were unable to, because Opportunity knocks but once.
I have been a space exploration fan since I was a little kid. Don't quite remember the moon landing, since I was only a couple months old. The Spirit/Opportunity pair truly represent the pinnacle of what a dedicated group of creative, well funded scientists and engineers can accomplish.
The extreme resilience and flexibility of the platform, the brilliant schemes the team devised to cope with aging subsystems, and the sheer amount of scientific exploration accomplished on a system with such a small and conservative mission plan.
Definitely my personal favorite technical project of all time. There are milestones in every scientific genre, and this was truly a milestone. The team redefined with very definition of remote mechanical exploration and every rover mankind has sent since has built on the foundation of these two.
I don't mean in any way to diminish the accomplishments of stationary exploration landers like the Vikings, or to demean the early rovers like the Russina Lunokhod rovers (which were truly envelope pushing machines) but the Mars Exploration Rovers demonstrated functional autonomy and extreme robust mechanical miniaturization that really made them the first of their kind.
"Proximity to wonder has blunted our perception and appreciation of it" --Tim Hartnell in 'Exploring ARTIFICIAL INTELLI
which where rich in emotion but rather poor in science for the money.
An this would wrong. We got back a shit load of science for the investment in the apollo program. There is the technical knowledge. Advancements in rockets. We learned how to dock in space. How to land spaceships on another planet.
From the samples returned from the moon. We learned the age of the moon, and therefor the earth. We learned the origin earth and the moon system. We learned that the moon is moving away from the earth and about 1cm a year, which cause drag on the earth, which is the reason the day is getting longer. We learned that the moon might be a incredible source of energy.
And so on and on. In just raw science the program leading up to apollo and apollo itself might just be the best investment we ever made in the space program.
I read at +2. If your post doesn't reach that level I will not see or respond to it.