Here, among the Martian rocks and sand, is the final resting place of one of the most
important robotic explorers in human history, the Mars Opportunity rover.
The little robot was only supposed to last 90 days, but ended up exploring Mars for years,
until one fateful day, it would go into hibernation mode, sleep and wait for a brutal global martian
sandstorm to be over.
But the Mars robotic explorer would never wake up again.
Get ready to discover the Opportunity rover’s mission, what it uncovered on the red planet,
and learn how the mission finally came to an end for our heroic little robot.
[LOGO]
On July 7th, 2003 at 8:18 PM, the Opportunity Rover was launched towards Mars from Cape
Canaveral, Florida.
Its mission: to search for signs of ancient water that has since disappeared on the red
planet.
Opportunity was the second in a pair of identical Mars exploration rovers’; its twin, the
‘Spirit’ rover, landed just weeks before Opportunity on January 4, 2004.
The rovers each have six wheels, each with its own electric motor on what’s called
a rocker-bogie system to enable and increase mobility.
The rovers stand 1.5 meters tall [4.9 feet], measure 2.3 meters wide [7.5 feet], 1.6 meters
long [5.2 feet], and weigh around 180 kilograms [400 pounds] each.
On January 25, 2004, after traveling from Earth for six long months, the Opportunity
rover landed on Mars in a capsule shaped like a tetrahedron, which had airbags on all sides
that inflated before landing.
The rover capsule bounced at least 26 times before coming to a stop in the center of its
small target crater.
NASA called the landing an interplanetary ‘hole-in-one’ and nick-named the spot
‘Eagle Crater’.
The crater is in an area called Meridiani Planum; an extraterrestrial plain where mineral
deposits could be evidence there was once a lake inside the impact crater.
It was time for Opportunity, nicknamed ‘Oppy’, to unfold itself and begin operations.
The first thing on the list would be snapping images of the surface of Mars that researchers
back home were eager to see.
The Mars rover would get to test its Pancam camera setup to scan the horizon of Mars,
and take images of landforms that could have been shaped by ancient oceans or rivers.
The Panoramic Cameras, or Pancams, are a pair of high resolution color stereo CCD cameras.
Each camera ‘eye’ has color filters on rotating wheels allowing certain colors to
be selected for imaging, and the two cameras sit about 12 inches apart.
These two little cameras are small enough to fit in the palm of your hand, but can create
panoramic images as big as 4,000 pixels high, and 24,000 pixels around.
The Pancam can swing up and down 180° degrees, and rotate a full 360° degrees to grab panoramic
views of the Martian landscape.
But the rover would first use its Navcams to grab this image of Eagle Crater shortly
after it had landed.
The rim of the crater is about 10 meters [32 feet] from the rover.
The size of the crater itself was estimated to be 20 meters [65 feet] in diameter.
You can see the rover's mast, which had not been raised yet, and its dust-free pristine
solar panels.
On the horizon in the photo, you can see the brighter hued rocks on the wall of the crater.
Once the mast with the Pancams was raised, NASA got an amazing image back from the rover
showing the inside of the crater, this time using the color filters.
You can see in the middle left of the photo the indentations on the Martian soil from
the now deflated airbags.
On the 20th Martian day of the mission, the world would get the view of a sunset from
another world captured by Oppy’s left panoramic camera.
On the rover's 24th Martian day exploring the surface, the panoramic camera took this
image, showing Opportunity’s empty lander.
NASA named this Challenger Memorial Station in honor of the Space Shuttle Challenger astronauts.
The image is a mosaic of 12 different color images using the cameras’ red, green, and
blue filters, which are set to approximate the colors the human eye would see.
Now there’s a big reason why the cameras are designed this way.
When looking at images like this one in false color, the differences in surface materials
are more visible, and easier to identify.
The rover snapped its first 360 degree image composed of 225 frames, and shows the eerie
landscape of Mars.
Opportunity was taking a lot of fantastic and breathtaking photos.
But was it going to find evidence of water?
It turns out it would, and on March 2, 2004, Opportunity discovered what it was sent to
find.
Scientists announce that the rock outcrop the rover explored was once covered in water.
On March 18, 2004, the Opportunity rover ended up proving, without a doubt, that Mars once
had a lot of liquid water.
This image shows what NASA researchers named ‘blueberries’; hematite spheres that were
formed in the presence of water [H2O] that contained iron.
Then in late March 2004, Opportunity left its landing spot and headed towards Endurance
Crater.
Scientists wanted to study the bedrock layers at the crater to figure out how long this
part of Mars was wet.
A strange image taken by the rover on October 7, 2004 shows a weird, lumpy rock formation
that researchers named Wopmay on the lower slopes of Endurance crater.
No one is sure how these bizarre rocks were formed, but one idea is that the impact caused
them, and another theory is that water soaking the rock dried up and caused their deformed
look.
One of the rovers' most interesting finds was rocks that were similar to meteorites
found on Earth.
Opportunity had a rock abrasion tool that it could use to drill into rocks to discover
their composition.
No one was sure if this was a meteorite or not.
But on January 6th, 2005, the Mars exploration robot would find the first meteorite ever
discovered on another planet.
Oppy’s spectrometers scanned the basketball sized meteorite and discovered it was mostly
made of iron and nickel.
And this is not all the strange and interesting things it would discover.
In 2010, Opportunity was snapping some images high up on a ridge of where it had previously
traveled, when it looked back to snap a Martian dust devil twisting through the valley below
it.
One of the more ominous images that Opportunity grabbed was this one taken on March 20, 2014.
Oppy is looking away from the sun into Endurance Crater, and sees its shadow.
But with all this exploring and traversing a wasteland, things can get dusty on the Martian
plains.
During the first week of January 2014, Opportunity would use its Pancams again and grab a self
portrait of its solar panels, showing a lot of dust covering the panels.
Not bad considering it had been there 10 years.
The panels looked nothing like when the rover first landed…but the little robot continued
on.
A big day for Opportunity would come in December 2011 when it discovered a vein of gypsum,
a mineral that forms in water.
The vein wasn’t very big, only as wide as your thumb and 30 centimeters long.
However, this is the most powerful piece of evidence that liquid water once existed on
Mars, and that the planet could have been potentially habitable just like Earth.
Opportunity had found evidence of water before.
But those discoveries were in sandstones, and this was definitely proof of ancient water.
To celebrate its 5,000th day on Mars in February 2018, Oppy used the Microscopic Imager camera
on the end of its robotic arm to take a series of images that were stitched together into
a self-portrait.
It shows the rover at a place called Perseverance Valley on the slopes of Endeavor Crater.
It’s not a very good image, because the camera is a fixed-focus camera that was designed
for close inspection of rocks and Martian soil.
At this time, everyone was surprised at the record breaking robot's longevity.
But the solar panels were already covered with a lot of dust, as engineers saw in previous
selfies.
But in late May, 2018, project scientists knew that a dust storm on Mars was going to
be a big one, yet they had no idea how big it would be.
Once every five-and-a-half Earth years, there is a huge dust storm on Mars.
By June 20, 2018, NASA announced the dust storm had gone global, and evolved into a
planetary-encircling dust event.
This storm was huge, and created enough dust in the Martian atmosphere to completely blanket
the entire planet, which blocked out light from the Sun.
Not only was the Opportunity rover affected, but orbiting satellites with atmospheric instruments
could not see the red planet.
Most of Mars’ features were now hidden under a planet-wide opaque-beige dust cloud.
Opportunity would grab some more images before the sandstorm hit, and take these stunning
panoramic photos of its surroundings.
These are photos of the desolate martian landscape Perseverance Valley, the very last thing the
rover would see, and what would end up becoming a robot graveyard.
Just 10 days before this monster storm, Opportunity had sent data indicating the storm was lifting
massive amounts of dust all around Endeavor Crater where it was studying, and turning
day into night.
Oppy would grab one more image just before it powered off, and snapped this photo showing
Mars almost completely dark.
The rover's batteries were low on power at this time, and minutes after receiving this
data, the solar-powered robot geologist shut down, went into hibernation mode to ride out
the storm, and hopefully recharge its batteries to re-awake after it was over.
But that never happened.
The Martian dust that forms beautiful patterns on the planet's surface, would end up being
lethal for the robotic rover.
The storm started to die down in late July, and by mid-September it subsided enough for
NASA engineers to try and contact Opportunity.
They spent the next eight months, and sent over a thousand commands to try and wake the
robot up.
But on February 13, 2019, with some sadness and tears, NASA announced the Opportunity
rover was dead, just a day after the final calls to wake Oppy up went unanswered.
Kind of a sad story for our robotic explorer, but what a success the mission was!
Opportunity was the longest-lived rover ever sent to another planet, and explored the red
plains of Mars for more than 15 years, snapping photos, and revealing clues and evidence of
the planet's watery distant past.
The rover had traveled more than 32 kilometers [20 miles], its progress seen best on this
map with the US Washington D.C. state shown for scale.
And by the way, you might be wondering what happened to Opportunity’s twin.
The Spirit Mars rover stopped communicating with NASA on March 22, 2010.
The robot got stuck in a sand trap, and its batteries eventually died.
However, it also made it past its original mission warranty of 90 Martian days and lasted
2,200 sols, or 2,266 Earth days.
Both rovers opened a treasure chest of discovery on Mars, proving that the planet once had
water, and laying the groundwork for future missions to Mars, including picking out landing
sites.
Together they returned 342,432 raw images, and traveled nearly 53 kilometers [33 miles],
showing us what being on another planet looks like.
All we can do now is thank these little robots for their service.
Perhaps future manned missions to Mars could recover these two robotic heroes.
What other things would you like to see and hear about Mars exploration?
Let us know in the comments.
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