NASA says goodbye to Opportunity rover on Mars

NASA has said goodbye to the rover 15 years after the Opportunity landed on Mars. The space agency lost contact with the Opportunity in June last year and was unable to restore it.

NASA has sent more than a thousand commands since June 2018 to contact Opportunity but to no avail. With that, the mission of the Mars rover has officially come to an end. The space agency hoped that in recent months wind would blow the amount of dust from the solar panels of the carriage.

A major storm in June caused those panels to be covered in a layer of dust. The storm was so severe that the sun was not visible from Opportunity’s point of view, so it couldn’t charge anyway. But even before the contact was lost, the rover already showed the necessary defects.

As of 2015, for example, the 256MB of flash memory stopped working, so that the system forgot everything every morning when it woke up from its deep sleep. NASA therefore had to send all data from the short-term memory as quickly as possible. NASA put the rover into a deep sleep every night because Opportunity’s arm generated permanent heat relatively soon after landing, threatening to drain the battery too quickly. In the end, the deep sleep also no longer worked optimally, because the clock of the rover was disrupted.

Thanks to the tricks of NASA, the good battery and a bit of luck, the mission was enormously successful. The Mars rover’s battery was designed for 5,000 charge and discharge cycles, and it still had 85 percent of its capacity left at the time of contact loss. Combined with periodic winds on Mars that blew the dust off the solar panels, the rover lasted much longer than planned. Initially, it would be a 90-day mission and the rover would cover a maximum of one kilometer.

However, the carriage lasted 15 years, covering 45 kilometers, with a peak distance of 220 meters on March 20, 2005. In doing so, it sent 217,000 images, including fifteen 360-degree photos. Opportunity began its journey on the Martian surface on January 24, 2004 in the Meridiani Planum region. He ended it in Perseverance Valley, or the Valley of Perseverance.