US space agency NASA has confirmed Opportunity is no longer operational on the Red Planet’s surface. Opportunity, which had been exploring Mars since 2004, fell victim to a massive dust storm, which blotted out the sun, its source of energy. But many may not know Opportunity was not the only NASA mission currently exploring the Red planet.
Opportunity operated for 15 years on the surface of Mars, far more than the nine month mission initially planned.
NASA engineers extended Opportunity’s life-span with tricks such as driving the Mars rover backward to compensate for a faulty wheel.
15 years is the longest amount of time any human-built robot has spent exploring another world.
To put this into context, Opportunity’s “twin” Spirit, which also landed in 2004, stopped operating back in 2010.
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Opportunity’s legacy:
Opportunity set a one-day Mars driving record in 2005, when it traveled 721 feet (220 meters).
Opportunity beamed-back more than 217,000 images, including 15 360-degree colour panoramas.
The NASA rover exposed the surfaces of 52 rocks to reveal fresh mineral surfaces for analysis and cleared 72 additional targets with a brush to prepare them for inspection with spectrometers and a microscopic imager.
Opportunity also discovered hematite, a mineral that forms in water, at its landing site.
And the Mars rover also found strong indications of the action of ancient water similar to the drinkable water of a pond or lake on Earth, at the Endeavour Crater.
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NASA Curiosity:
The NASA Curiosity rover is a continuation of NASA’s long-term robotic exploration of the red planet.
Curiosity was designed to assess whether Mars ever had an environment able to support small life forms called microbes. In other words, its mission is to determine the planet’s “habitability.”
To find out, the rover carries the biggest, most advanced suite of instruments for scientific studies ever sent to the martian surface.
The Curiosity rover is analysing samples scooped from the soil and drilled from rocks.
The record of the planet’s climate and geology is essentially “written in the rocks and soil”, in their formation, structure, and chemical composition.
The Curiosity rover’s onboard laboratory will study rocks, soils, and the local geologic setting in order to detect chemical building blocks of life on Mars and will assess what the martian environment was like in the past.
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NASA Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter:
NASA’s Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter, launched in 2005, is on a search for evidence that water persisted on the surface of Mars for a long period of time.
While other Mars missions have shown that water flowed across the surface in Mars’ history, it remains a mystery whether water was ever around long enough to provide a habitat for life.
The NASA Reconnaissance Orbiter’s studies will determine if there are deposits of minerals that form in water over long periods of time, detect any shorelines of ancient seas and lakes, and analyse deposits placed in layers over time by flowing water.
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The Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter will also determine if the underground martian ice discovered by the Mars Odyssey orbiter is the top layer of a deep ice deposit or whether it is a shallow layer in equilibrium with the current atmosphere and its seasonal cycle of water vapour.
The orbiter’s telecommunications systems will also establish a crucial service for future spacecraft, becoming the first link in a communications bridge back to Earth, an “interplanetary Internet” that can be used by numerous international spacecraft in coming years.
The orbiter also carries an experimental navigation camera. If it performs well, similar cameras placed on orbiters of the future would be able to serve as high-precision interplanetary “eyes” to guide incoming landers to precise landings on Mars, opening up exciting – but otherwise dangerous – areas of the planet to exploration.
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