On August 6, 2012, NASA’s Curiosity Rover successfully touched down on Aeolis Palus in Gale Crater on Mars...
...but at an average distance of 140M miles (225M km) from home, it is fated to celebrate every year in the loneliest way.
NASA has programmed Curiosity to “sing” Happy Birthday to itself using its soil Sample Analysis Unit.
When at work, the tool vibrates at different frequencies to sift and move soil in a process that generates a beeping sound.
By modulating this frequency, NASA scientists are able to mimic the notes in Happy Birthday for Curiosity’s party of one.
Sadder still, the rover has no microphone and niether it nor its human minders can hear the tune.
ESA’s Philae was the “little lander that could” as it completed the first-ever soft landing on a comet in 2014.
The 220-pound (100 kg) probe was barely able to hang on when its anchoring harpoons failed to fire into Comet 67P.
Philae bounced twice off the surface for over an hour before finally settling into a crevice under the shadow of a cliff.
Weak without solar-power, the lander still managed to transmit 60-hours of experiments before having to take a “nap.”
Only brief links were made again with Philae as the comet neared the Sun, and in 2016 it Tweeted that its life was nearly at an end.
Despite vowing it “won’t give up just yet” even though it was “cold and dark,” the little lander was lost after a final Tweet:
“I’m far from Earth&Sun!I’d love to take memories of YOU with me. Please send me a postcard from home! #GoodbyePhilae”
First detected as a faint glimmer of X-ray light in 2009, researchers call CX330 the loneliest star in the universe.
The find was announced in 2016 after new analysis of the unusual object using data from the NASA Chandra X-Ray Observatory.
The baby star is likely less than 1 million years old, and the closest neighboring star field is over a thousand light years away.
Located in a “middle of nowhere” bulge of the Milky Way, scientists are not sure how CX330 formed outside a stellar nursery.
CX330’s is expected to have a “short and violent” life and would likely eat any planets that tried to form and make friends.
NASA’s International Sun-Earth Explorer 3 was parked in Earth’s orbit from 1978 until the agency decided to fling it away in 1983.
Having completed its original mission, it was renamed the International Cometary Explorer and nudged towards Halley’s Comet.
After performing a complicated series of 15 propulsive maneuvers to catch 5 lunar gravity assists, ICE was on its way.
NASA’s final contact with ICE was supposed to be in 1999, but an engineer forgot to tell it to stop trying to talk to Earth.
ICE spent 9 years alone in space trying to send updates on its mission, but nobody back home was listening.
In 2008, ICE’s former flight director remembered that it would soon be passing Earth again and reestablished contact.
Volunteers attempted to send commands to get the probe home in 2014, but it ran out of fuel and was lost in an unknown orbit.
This depressing photo taken by NASA’s Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO) in November 2016 shows all that is left of Schiaparelli...
...a European Mars lander that slammed into the Red Planet several weeks earlier after malfunctioning during its descent.
In addition to the black impact crater, the MRO’s camera picked up the shiny pieces Schiaparelli left behind after it exploded.
Analysis of the mission’s telemetry data suggests Schiaparelli’s heat shield and parachute worked as expected...
...however, a software error caused thrusters to fire for 3 seconds instead of 30, and it hit the ground at 180 mph (300 km/h).
Despite the “mishap,” ESA officials declared Schiaparelli a success as it had “fulfilled” its assigned “landing” duty.