The scientists and engineers who work with the Mars rovers don’t think of them as robots. They regard them almost like their own children. So…
The scientists and engineers who work with the Mars rovers don’t think of them as robots. They regard them almost like their own children.
So Wednesday brought considerable sadness combined with a fair amount of pride to the folks at NASA, which pronounced the Mars rover Opportunity dead after a record-setting 15-year run. It had stopped communicating more than eight months ago.
On one hand, the robot’s extended mission had been an unqualified success: Opportunity confirmed water once flowed in Mars and roamed the planet’s surface for an unprecedented 28 miles.
On the other hand, no parent wants to leave a child behind, even when knowing ahead of time that the separation was inevitable.
Opportunity and its identical twin, Spirit, outlived and outperformed expectations on opposite sides of Mars. The golf-cart-size rovers were designed to operate as geologists for just three months after reaching Mars in January 2004. Spirit was ruled dead in 2011, a year after it got stuck in sand and stopped communicating.
In a news conference at the agency’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California, project manager John Callas recalled watching the rovers’ early development at a room he likened to a neonatal care facility.
