Opportunity

On Wednesday, NASA announced that they have officially ended the Opportunity program, after again failing to establish communication with the rover on Tuesday night. The rover lost contact with Earth on June 10th, 2018. Opportunity was a golf-cart sized rover that was sent to Mars in 2004 to collect geological data pertaining to Mars’s hydrologic history. It was designed to operate on the surface of Mars for 90 days. Instead, Opportunity explored Perseverance Valley for nearly 15 years.

Opportunity’s findings were significant. The rover found substantial evidence of a complete martian water cycle that existed about 3.8 billion years ago. Opportunity also provided those of us here on Earth with some of the most detailed images of the surface of an alien world that we’d yet seen. The tremendous success of this mission is not only a victory in the field of space exploration, but also in the fields of robotics and mechatronics at large.

I was a kid who grew up with interest in science and science fiction, and as such I was (and continue to be) greatly affected by the Mars rover projects. To put things in perspective, I was 8 years old the last time humanity has not had active robotic presence on mars. The teams responsible for Opportunity and the other rovers have done an immense service to people like me, and to humanity as a whole. Their work has not only shed light on the nature of our neighboring planet, but also inspired a new generation of innovators, and amazed all of those who look on.

Curiosity is now the only operational rover on Mars. NASA also operates the stationary InSight lander.

Thanks for everything Oppy. We’ll remember you.