Spirit and Opportunity weren’t given those names just because they sounded cool. A naming contest was run by NASA and the winning essay came from a 9-year-old girl from Arizona, Sofi Collis. Born in Siberia and adopted by American parents at age two, “She has in her heritage and upbringing the soul of two great spacefaring countries,” said NASA Administrator Sean O’Keefe.”,Opportunity launched atop a Delta II rocket about a month after Spirit, trailing it by nearly 50 million miles in space. “Opportunity joins Spirit and other Mars-bound missions from the European Space Agency, Japan and the United Kingdom, which together mark the most extensive exploration of another planet in history. This ambitious undertaking is an amazing feat for Planet Earth and the human spirit of exploration,” said NASA’s Ed Weiler at the time.”,You’d be excited too if you’d just stuck the landing for not one, but two rovers on a distant planet. Especially since Spirit had been having computer troubles just before. “We are two for two,” said Pete Theisinger, project manager for the rovers at JPL. “Here we are tonight with Spirit on a path to recovery and with Opportunity on Mars.”
The landing zone was Meridiani Planum, an area with features suggestive of conditions that would be favorable to supporting life.”,The panorama cameras on both rovers were not just a great way to check for potential science targets, but they provided a rich and exciting view of the planet unlike any seen before. This was the first panorama from Oppy, and it captured not only the landscape, but the bounce marks from its landing, and something surprising as well…”,Everyone was so jazzed to find life on Mars that they thought they did so in the first few days — in the form of a Martian rabbit scooting across the terrain. Let’s be clear: It’s not a rabbit. It’s probably a bit of the landing mechanism’s fabric that detached and blew away.
Since the early days people have seen faces, animals and other mysterious items on Mars. But Opportunity didn’t go there to find little green men, it went to find evidence that the planet may once have supported some form of life at all. Just a reminder that people sometimes see what they want to see.”,Spirit and Opportunity landed inside inflatable balls that, having been slowed from entry velocities by parachutes, bounced to a stop close to the target site. This technique has advanced over the years and now we have retros slowing the final drop rather than letting it bounce, but as you can see from this picture, everything went as planned and the rover was able to roll off with no problem.”,Opportunity’s immediate area may look barren, but being the surface of a strange planet, it was bound to have some cool stuff nearby. These “blueberries” were found in numerous places on its journey, and were determined to be rich in hematite, suggesting “a watery ancient environment.”
That these were right outside Opportunity’s landing area prompted the team to say that they had hit a “hole in one.””,It’s easy to forget that other planets are not static environments but have their own special moments of lighting and beauty, occasionally captured by the rover. In this case a sun near the horizon cast a sharp and dramatic shadow of the rover, which it captured with its front hazard-avoidance camera.
This and other shots like it emphasize the loneliness of the world, on which Opportunity and Spirit at the time were (as far as we know) the only things moving with purpose.”,Okay, in reality these dunes would appear much more monochromatic, but this false-color image highlights the scalloped shapes that made the bottom of Endurance crater such an enticing target. For scale, those ripples are probably about 2-3 feet tall.”,Opportunity’s small drill let it make shallow excavations into the rocks around it, both exposing lower layers and spraying dust around. Both make for interesting imagery to anyone concerned with the makeup of these stones and rocks. A true-color image like the one on the left is what you’d see if you were there, but collecting through multiple wavelengths separately and performing a bit of analysis yields the crazy-looking right one that highlights different materials based on their reflectance and other properties.”,Opportunity made history a little less than a year after it touched down with the discovery of the first meteorite ever found on another planet. This one was (and probably remains) about the size of a basketball and made mostly of iron and nickel. A slight course adjustment and it might have fallen on our planet.”,Speaking of meteorites, it’s not often you can bring your own and see the after effects. This impact site was where the landing assembly’s heat shield struck after being jettisoned. It hit hard enough to spray ejecta all over the place and expose a lot of subsurface soil. We’d never know what was under the darker surface layer unless we disturbed it — so disturb it we did.”,It’s strange to think of frost forming on another planet, but that’s what you get when there’s enough atomospheric water and low enough temperatures. In this image you can see that this little post is, in the image on the left, pretty much totally covered. On the right, once it thaws, you can see it has returned to its dark color. The presence of frost is a good indicator for lots of things, and perhaps in the future may even be harvested for water.”,These rovers aren’t just science experiments, they’re engineering experiments. And you can only simulate so much in the lab and out in the desert. Case in point: when Opportunity got mired in sand on a small prominence later dubbed Purgatory Dune, they had to improvise to get out of it.
It took five weeks of work but Opportunity eventually managed to free itself. Not only will the methods the team used be useful should the same happen in future missions but future rovers can be designed to avoid this issue in the first place — now that they know what to look for.”,This gorgeous shot is of course compelling simply because it’s a great picture of Opportunity. But false-color images like this also help the team navigate and spot interesting features.”,One crater may look much like another to us, but to geologists and planetary scientists they each are beautiful and unique snowflakes. Opportunity checked out a hundred or so, but this is one of the more impressive: Victoria Crater, dotted with whimsically named features: Duck Bay on the right, Cape St Mary on the left, and Cape Verde just below. Obviously you can’t make them out in that tiny version so click here for a big one.
Two weeks after these shots — hundreds make up a single panorama — Opportunity was over on Cape St Mary looking back at where it was before, cataloging the layered rocks for comparison back on Earth.”,Staring at clouds is fun, but not always rewarding in a scientific sense. That’s not the case here: Opportunity kept an eye on these clouds as they formed and drifted, suggesting that northeast of its location was a thermal plume producing “mid-level convective water clouds.”
That said, it’s also nice just to watch them drift in a time-lapse like this.”,This stripe of what appears to be gypsum is unlike anything else seen on Opportunity’s journey. “This tells a slam-dunk story that water flowed through underground fractures in the rock,” said principal investigator Steve Squyres. “This stuff is a fairly pure chemical deposit that formed in place right where we see it. It’s not uncommon on Earth, but on Mars, it’s the kind of thing that makes geologists jump out of their chairs.””,Another beautiful shot of Opportunity’s shadow, this time lending scale to the landscape it is surveying. This crater, the NASA description notes, is about the size of Seattle and 20 times bigger than the Victoria Crater from a couple slides back.
Note the incredible amount of dust stuck to the solar panels. It’s amazing it could get any power out of those at all! But guess what…”,Amazingly the changing seasons can occasionally work in a rover’s favor. The same winds that had layered dust on its panels for years suddenly blew clean in the Martian winter, scouring them clean again.”,You remember the “blueberries” from earlier, right? This is them in their natural habitat. This rock was called “Last Chance,” and it shows how these iron-rich sphere-like rocks were embedded in a material that was likely at one time wet enough to let them sink in, only to be trapped when it hardened years later.”,This is the Martian dawn on the 4,999th day (or rather, sol) of Opportunity’s mission. 24 hours later it would have spent 5,000 there, and still had a few months to go before it would be stifled by the planet-scale dust storm.”,As far as I can tell, this is the last image sent from Opportunity’s panoramic camera, on sol 5111. Its last images with any content were sent a few days before, but once the storm moved in there would be nothing to see — and no power coming in.
What you’re looking at is just noise, with the black indicating that the image failed to be sent completely.”,Opportunity was a huge achievement for everyone who worked on it, a success far beyond what anyone could possibly have expected. It has made tons of discoveries and immeasurably helped inform and improve the next set of Martian landers, from the still-trucking Curiosity to Insight — which landed late last year and is happily underway — to the 2020 rover, which is yet to be built.
It’s okay to be sad at the loss of a great robot, but don’t forget to be happy that it managed to do so much. Maybe in a few decades when you’re visiting Mars you’ll be able to thank it in person.”,Opportunity’s mission is complete, and the rover that was supposed to last 90 days closes the book on 15 years of exploration. It’s sad, but it’s also a great time to look back on the mission and see some of its greatest hits. Here are 25 images showing where it came from, where it went, and what it discovered on its marathon-length journey.
