Fondly remembering the record-breaking Mars rover
On January 25th, 2004, I was sitting at the family computer (an eMac, remember those?) with my daughter, anxiously awaiting news from the surface of Mars as to the fate of a robotic lander named “Opportunity”.
Even though Opportunity’s sister craft, “Spirit”, had landed successfully three weeks earlier, Mars landings are a tricky business and nothing was guaranteed. After waiting through the “7 Minutes of Terror” with NASA and the rest of the world, we were all relieved to hear that Opportunity had arrived safely and would be sending back pictures and other data in just days.
“She better hurry,” my daughter (who was just under four years old at the time) said. “She’s only got 90 days!”
For certain, Opportunity’s main mission was only supposed to last 90 Martian days (or “Sols” as NASA called them), each about 24 hours and 37 minutes long, and NASA had set an aggressive agenda to fill in those 90 Sols. Drilling into and analyzing rocks, “sniffing” soil samples and always, always looking for signs of ancient water.
Over those 90 Sols, Opportunity sent back amazing pictures and spectacular data. We followed the mission as closely as we could, and dreaded the day it would end.
But it didn’t end. Both Spirit and Opportunity kept right on rolling past their 90-day expiration dates, each getting one mission extension after the other. Spirit was the first to “die”. Having gotten stuck in some especially soft soil in 2009, it continued performing science in place until it became unresponsive in 2011.
Opportunity carried on, roving across the surface of Mars, surviving one Martian day after the next, until, in June of 2018, it got enveloped by a nearly planet-wide Martian dust storm and stopped responding to commands. The rover had survived smaller storms before, but this one was different. It (apparently) completely covered Opportunity’s solar panels, cutting off its source of power entirely.
So, just last week on February 13th, after trying almost 1,000 times to contact Opportunity, NASA declared the rover officially “dead”, and ended the mission.
In the end, Opportunity’s 90-Sol mission lasted 5,352 Sols, which is just over 15 years here on Earth, or eight Martian years. That is one hell of an extended mission. (My daughter, gladly, has also survived these last eight Martian years and is now off on her own extended mission studying biology in college.)
So, what did Opportunity accomplish in that time? The list is a long one, so I’ll just hit the highlights:
• Drove further than any other extra-terrestrial vehicle. Even though the rover would only move a few meters at a time, over the years it travelled across more than 28 miles of the Martian landscape.
• Found the first meteorite ever identified on another planet. This was an early discovery, as the meteorite was very close to where Opportunity landed. (It actually came across several meteorites during its mission.)
• Analyzed more than 100 different Martian rocks (including many that it drilled into and analyzed the innards of).
• Sent back more than 200,000 images, including many breathtaking panoramas that made Mars into a place we could visit one day, rather than just another point of light in the sky.
• Found definitive proof that Mars was once wet with liquid water. The first indication of this was when Opportunity came across dozens of tiny grey-ish rocks, nicknamed “blueberries”, near its landing site. These rocks were mainly hematite, which generally forms in the presence of liquid water. This was an early discovery, coming just weeks after landing. But, as Opportunity drove around Mars, it discovered more and more evidence for a Mars that was once warm and wet.
Of course, it will take years to finish going through the data from the mission, so, it’s not really over just yet. Still, there have been a lot of stories in the press and memes on the internet expressing sadness at the loss of the rover itself.
I dismissed those as silly at first, until I thought back to that day back in 2004 with my daughter on my lap, watching the feed from NASA, both of us waiting with that mix of dread and excitement that only comes from exploration.
That was a moment I’ll cherish as a parent, and one that, I think, was greatly responsible for instilling a love of science into my daughter’s heart.
In many ways, this mission was, if you’ll pardon the pun, the Opportunity of our lifetimes, and we’re not likely to see another like it any time soon.
Steven W. Disbrow is the proprietor of “Improv Chattanooga” on the South Side of town. He also creates e-commerce systems and reads comic books when he’s not on stage acting like a fool.