back
38 comments
Congratulations to everyone who helped to make such a successful mission possible.

As an undergraduate, I remember friends working on the Pancam. One of our treasured instrument-makers at UW built the sundials. Science is a very human endeavor -- real people built, tested, launched, landed, operated, navigated, investigated, and interpreted. Some of the people who will use the measurements made by Opportunity have yet to be born.

Thank you for doing something incredible.

Young people tend to take the presence of rovers on Mars for granted thanks in large part to Spirit and Opportunity and the amazing job they did of exceeding even the most optimistic expectations for their longevity. Kids who are in high-school today don't remember a time when there wasn't a rover exploring mars. The people responsible for that success of Spirit and Opportunity have enabled a generation of scientists and engineers to grow up knowing that something built by humans is driving around on another planet. Prior to Spirit and Opportunity n rover on the surface of mars was the exception. Since Spirit and Opportunity it has been the rule.

The Mars Exploration Rovers have been truly groundbreaking in terms of how we think about the feasibility of exploring other planets. The idea that we would send a rover to another planet and it would drive around studying for more than a decade would have been laughable in 2004. Now it is something that we think of as being perfectly reasonable. That is an amazing accomplishment.

Completely agree. I'd like to add: people talk about colonizing Mars as a future event that will take place. I assert that we are currently in the early stages of colonizing Mars. We have [had?] multiple rovers driving around, and multiple science labs on the surface and a global satellite network in orbit. When we first landed a probe on Mars, someone asked Ray Bradbury "So, where are the martians?", to which he replied "We are the Martians!"
I remember the magic of Pathfinder. The Martian landscape in panoramic colour for the very first time. It's almost mundane now, but back then it felt like the start of the science fiction age.

Then again, maybe it was.

Well, if we ever do send humans to Mars just have them visit the site and fix 'er up and she'll be good for another decade.
You might just like this short story I read in Wired a while back: https://www.wired.com/2016/12/jon-rogers-a-martian-goes-hunt...
In The Martian, Mark Watney briefly considered the possibility of salvaging Opportunity for its radio the way he did Pathfinder (before inadvertently frying its circuits), but decided against it, as, by then, he was on his way to the Ares IV MAV, and close enough for it not to matter much.
Don't forget to also fix Beagle 2!
I think all chances of that being fixed ended with a loud THUD noise :)
It landed fine, it just didn't unfurl completely.
I didn't know that. Good to hear it was at least a partial success!
Here's an image in this article: https://www.space.com/32691-europe-beagle-2-mars-lander-phot...
I was rooting for this little guy to continue it's long legacy. Back around 2010 I happened upon Squyres' book on bringing the MER(s) to reality & I've been hooked ever since.

Def'y a good read:

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/832170.Roving_Mars

My battery is low and it’s getting dark.

- Opportunity

Daisy, Daisy, tell me your answer t
Bicycle Built for Two Thousand, a collaborative recreation of the IBM 7094 singing: https://youtu.be/Gz4OTFeE5JY
Did it actually say this? I've seen it claimed on social media, but I don't understand how.
Power: 7% Lux: 16%

Power: 4% Lux: 12%

Power: 2% Lux: 10%

Powe

Something like that I would imagine.

Thanks, Lenny Henry's nuts.
Could start sending again if eventually undigged by another dust storm or was just crashed?
I don't think so. From what I understand the problem is temperature, if it runs out of power its unable to keep the important parts warm and won't be able to turn back on.
From my understanding, that's basically right. The Rovers rely on the heat from their electronics to keep the electronics warm. While it could recover, when out of power the electronics will drop below their design temperature, making it more likely something will break (or already has).
So it goes.

We thank the MERs for their service to our kind.

The relevant XKCDs: https://xkcd.com/695/ & https://xkcd.com/1504/
And today's tribute: https://xkcd.com/2111/
I haven't laughed so much at an XKCD strip in awhile as I did when I read the second one. Thanks for sharing.
The first one made me cry!
hope it will wake up
Mike Seibert, who was also part of the team, paid tribute to the rover, dubbed “Oppy”, saying “Goodbye old friend” and noting that the rover was the longest lasting surface mission yet
NASA, not Nasa.
It's a style difference. The Guardian is a British paper. In British English, acronyms are usually written in title case, rather than all-caps as they are in American English.
Exactly. They are using the BBC News style guide here: https://www.bbc.co.uk/academy/en/collections/news-style-guid...

And here are articles that address NASA vs Nasa: http://www.bbc.co.uk/blogs/collegeofjournalism/entries/8f7cf...

https://www.bbc.co.uk/academy/en/articles/art201307021121335...

"our style is to use lower case with an initial cap for acronyms, where you would normally pronounce the set of letters as a word (eg Aids, Farc, Eta, Nafta, Nasa, Opec, Apec)."

Cool, then they can call it the Bbc. Oops, they never do that. #consistencyisrad
? Most people say Bee-Bee-See, so BBC is consistent.
They still capitalize each letter for initialisms (acronyms where each letter is pronounced such as B-B-C)
I just realized that the reason we fully capitalize acronyms in the US is because we don't know the difference between acronyms and initialisms.
No, it's because we see them as mostly the same thing. It's only when we no longer really care about what it stands for, and that it's become an actual word (rather than a name), where we stop capitalizing it, and then we don't even use titlecase. Examples are "laser" and "snafu".

NASA isn't a word, it's a proper name, and the agency itself uses all-caps when referring to itself. The proper spelling is therefore "NASA". It's just like this for any proper name: there's a correct way to spell and capitalize it, and any other way is wrong. An example here would be any company which uses CamelCase in their name, and officially spells their company name that way. If you decide you don't like camelcase and only use titlecase, then you're spelling their name wrong; you don't get to decide how to spell someone else's name.

This is just another example of British English being wrong-headed, just as they do with referring to corporate entities with plural. American English isn't perfect by any means, but modern-day British English seems to go to great lengths to be different for no good reason.

It's dead, Jim.