The Mars Opportunity rover’s 15-year mission: To boldly go into Martian craters everywhere. But now that it’s over, where does it rank in…
The Mars Opportunity rover’s 15-year mission: To boldly go into Martian craters everywhere. But now that it’s over, where does it rank in the grand scheme of unmanned space exploration?
From the “golden records” put on the Voyager spacecrafts – which offer alien listeners a taste of Chuck Berry, Bach and Mozart – to the Hubble’s telescope’s ability to see hundreds of Earth-like planets, the Mars rover project has tough competition, both in terms of notoriety and scientific achievement.
But Spirit and Opportunity, the twin Mars exploration rovers, have a notable legacy: They are among the most hands-on probes that man ever launched into the cosmos, scouring all over the red planet, popping into craters, and roaming the dusty plains of an alien landscape. Among their major finds is evidence that the surface of Mars once had liquid water.
The rover Opportunity, lost to the complications from a Martian dust storm, was finally declared dead by NASA on Wednesday, five thousand, three hundred, and fifty-two days after landing. Its sister craft Spirit met its end in 2010.
“Robotic space exploration has become the heavy lifter for serious space science,” Phys.org once wrote in a primer on the subject of unmanned exploration. “While shuttle launches and the International Space Station get all the media coverage, these small, relatively inexpensive unmanned missions are doing important science in the background.
