This month, NASA had to say farewell to the Opportunity rover, which had been exploring Mars for the past 15 years.
Opportunity landed on Mars on 25 January 2004. It was supposed to last just 90 Martian days (sols), or 87 Earth days, but ended up surviving 5,111 sols, until 10 June 2018.
Its final months are a tale of grit, literal and figurative: late last spring, a dust storm engulfed the entire Martian planet—the worst, most severe storm ever observed there.
Blasts of wind kicked fine grains of dust and sand off the surface, and because of the planet’s weak gravity, the particles hung in the atmosphere for months. The storm was so powerful and the clouds so thick that they prevented sunlight from reaching the rover’s solar panels. As Opportunity relied on solar power to survive, these conditions were unbearable. Despite trying to hibernate through the storm by entering safe mode, when the storm finally died down in late 2018 the rover failed to wake up again.
NASA last heard from Oppy in June 2018, and after 7 months of trying to wake it up, scientists finally declared they had done all they could. The mission was over.