What killed opportunity?
Opportunity was pronounced dead by NASA on the 13th of February 2019, but what killed it?
Was it crippling loneliness, not enough exercise or old age?
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Opportunity landed on mars on the 25th of January 2004, and the plan was for it to look at rocks for 90 days. It lasted 15 years, but it wasn’t easy.
From late April to early June 2005, Opportunity was perilously lodged in a sand dune, with several wheels buried in the sand. Simulations were performed to decide how best to extract the rover from its position without risking permanent immobilization.
In December 2014, NASA reported that Opportunity was suffering from "amnesia" events in which the rover fails to write data, e.g. telemetry information, to non-volatile memory. Non-volatile memory is memory that remains even after power is lost. The hardware failure is believed to be due to an age-related fault in one of the rover's seven memory banks. As a result, NASA had aimed to force the rover's software to ignore the failed memory bank, however amnesia events continued to occur which eventually resulted in vehicle resets. In light of this, on Sol 4027 (May 23, 2015), the rover was configured to operate in RAM-only mode, completely avoiding the use of non-volatile memory for storage.
But, A sandstorm, or a dust storm, is what ultimately killed opportunity on the 10th of June 2018. The rover was powered by solar panels, but due to the dust, opportunity didn’t have enough power to maintain communications with earth. Opportunity’s last words were “My battery is low and it’s getting dark”
This is the last picture that Opportunity tried to send back to earth, I say tried because he ran out of power before it could finish sending, which explains the black bar.
"Perseverance Valley" became Opportunity's final resting spot, where he may lay dormant for hundreds, thousands or even an infinite number of years.
I don’t like sand, it’s coarse and rough and irritating, and it kills mars rovers.
Over the course of Opportunity’s life, we received more than 200,000 images, learned a thing or two, and got plenty of conspiracy clickbait.
rip Opportunity
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