How long can opportunity rover last

The skies cleared up, but Oppy stayed asleep. Unfortunately, the window on re-establishing contact with the rover is almost surely about to close. The Martian winter is what killed the Spirit Rover back in Even if this is the end of Opportunity, there is no question the mission has been a phenomenal success. The quasar J is 13 billion light-years away from Earth.

There were memories and laughs shared. ThankYouOppy GoodnightOppy pic. Tanya Harrison tanyaofmars February 13, Spirit and Opportunity, known together as the Mars Exploration Rovers mission, were launched individually in the summer of and touched down in January of — 15 years ago! Each was equipped with a panoramic camera, a macro camera, spectrometers for identifying rocks and minerals and a little drill for taking samples.

The goal was to operate for 90 days, traveling about 40 meters each day and ultimately covering about a kilometer. Both exceeded those goals by incredible amounts. Spirit ended up traveling about 7. As the craft landed Jan. Designed to travel 1, yards and run for 90 Martian sols days that are 39 minutes longer than Earth days , the golf-cart size rover had roamed more than 28 miles and logged more than 5, sols before a massive dust storm hit last May.

Hours after landing in Eagle Crater, Opportunity relayed panoramic images back to Earth. Cornell graduate and undergraduate students rolled up their sleeves to work on the mission. Along with Squyres, Jim Bell, at the time a Cornell assistant professor of astronomy now at Arizona State University, led the panoramic camera group and a platoon of Cornell students to guide the on-board tools and turn the rover into a mobile geologist.

Although bound to Earth, many Cornell undergraduate and graduate students worked on and learned from the mission. The connections I made as an undergraduate persist to this day. Squyres brought the mission into his classroom and shared fresh science with students — even before he had analyzed it. For most of the mission, Squyres and the Cornell members of the science operations team met in the Space Sciences Building every weekday to help decide the paths and the science of the rovers.