Opportunity, the intrepid NASA rover that spent 15 years on Mars climbing in and out of craters to gather evidence of the planet's watery past, has been brought down by tiny particles of dust.
After weeks of trying to revive the veteran Mars rover in the wake of a blinding dust storm, NASA has given up on ever hearing from it again.
It's a humble ending for a machine that survived a 300-million-mile journey through space, executed a hole-in-one landing, and set a record by driving more than 28 extraterrestrial miles.
Opportunity's last transmission to Earth occurred on June 10 amid an epic Martian dust storm. Still, NASA engineers remained hopeful that when the dust settled, the rover would recharge its solar-powered batteries and resume its superlative mission.
Opportunity landed on Mars in January 2004 for a mission that was supposed to last 90 Martian days. Its twin rover, Spirit, had landed three weeks earlier on the other side of the planet.
"With a sense of deep appreciation and gratitude, I declare the Opportunity mission is complete," Thomas Zurbuchen, associate administrator of NASA's Science Mission Directorate, told a crowd gathered at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in La Cañada Flintridge.
In the beginning, though, the rover’s main goal was to find evidence of water on Mars, which it did almost as soon as it opened its eyes. This is one of the first views it saw after landing January 25, 2004, in a small depression named Eagle crater near the Martian equator.
Opportunity Rover
They each had high-resolution color cameras that gave them the equivalent of 20/20 vision. Each had a robotic arm with a shoulder, elbow and wrist, allowing them to reach out and examine anything that looked interesting.
Using an infrared spectrometer, they scanned the Martian landscape for rocks and soil that contained minerals that form in water. A microscopic imager gave them the ability to look at the texture of a rock up close and at a very fine scale.
They also had two spectrometers that enabled them to determine the mineral composition of stones and boulders, and a little diamond-tipped grinding tool to chip away at the surface of a rock and see what lay beneath.
Using an infrared spectrometer, they scanned the Martian landscape for rocks and soil that contained minerals that form in water. A microscopic imager gave them the ability to look at the texture of a rock up close and at a very fine scale.
They also had two spectrometers that enabled them to determine the mineral composition of stones and boulders, and a little diamond-tipped grinding tool to chip away at the surface of a rock and see what lay beneath.
"It was essentially a robotic geologist with eyes, a hand lens and a rock hammer," Squyres said. "The difference is that instead of taking something interesting back to the lab, we took our laboratory with us."
Armed with this arsenal, Opportunity quickly found strong evidence that itsoriginal landing site once contained a large body of salty water. The physical appearance of the rocks and the discovery that many of them contained minerals that usually form in watery conditions revealed that the dry and dusty planet did indeed have a secret, wetter past.
Later, mission planners drove the rover across 20 miles of bumpy Martian terrain to an ancient crater named Endeavour. There it encountered even older rocks and found veins of a mineral that scientists believed to be gypsum.
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