Saturday, February 17th marks the 5,000th local day (sol) of operations for NASA’s Mars Opportunity rover, which was originally designed to last for just 90 sols after its January 2004 landing date, but has instead continued to set milestones like completing a marathon-length tour of its surroundings and taking huge composite photos of its new world’s surface.
Saturday, February 17th marks the 5,000th local day (sol) of operations for NASA’s Mars Opportunity rover, which was originally designed to last for just 90 sols after its January 2004 landing date, but has instead continued to set milestones like completing a marathon-length tour of its surroundings and taking huge composite photos of its new world’s surface.
Now some 28 miles (45 kilometers) from its original, NASA-trash-covered landing site, Opportunity continues to provide a wealth of scientific data about Mars, NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory wrote in a blog post:
According to JPL, Opportunity has now taken over 225,000 photos, including a recent selfie NASA posted on Friday.
It’s also drilled into Martian rocks and repeatedly turned up evidence that the planet’s surface once harbored liquid water. While its twin rover, Spirit, sent its last transmission in 2010 after getting stuck in sand and losing power, Opportunity has been able to continuously recharge thanks to Marian winds which clear dust from its solar panels. It has at times experienced significant downtime like 19 weeks stuck in a single spot, Space.com reported, or another occasion it got stuck in a sand dune. Opportunity’s NASA controllers have to periodically re-orient the rover to get better exposure to sunlight.
Per NASA, Spirit and Opportunity’s onboard instruments included four spectrometers and rock abrasion tools, which helped provide huge amounts of information about the composition of Mars’ surface and its weather patterns:
Both models were major improvements on their predecessors, Popular Science noted. In 1997, NASA’s Pathfinder mission arrived on Mars, but its Sojourner rover broke down after just three months and carried a relative dearth of useful scientific tools. The United Kingdom’s Beagle 2 lander was lost in 2003 upon arrival, likely after failing to fully deploy solar arrays that blocked its transmitters. The most recent NASA craft to roam the Red Planet, the Curiosity rover, uses a small radioisotope thermoelectric generator as its power source and has currently spent just over 1,960 sols on Mars.
[ JPL / Popular Science]
