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More than 1,000 orders have been sent since the Opportunity rover, the size of a golf cart, is you, June 10, 2018, a victim of a historic global storm that has submerged March. NASA said the mission was completed at a press conference on Feb. 13 at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California.
The rover probably had multiple defects, the dust plummeting in the dark on the western edge of Endeavor crater near the equator of Mars. The opportunity solar panels did not allow the instruments and heaters to function to maintain communication with NASA and keep the rover alive. On the other side of the planet, the Curiosity rover has reported a night minimum at -97 degrees Fahrenheit. The stockings have not exceeded -70s since then.
Earth's latest Opportunity message included measures of power generation (21 watts / hour, down 97% since the storm began) and atmospheric opacity (10.8 vs. at normal tau of 0.5 and below the 2.0 value needed to produce enough energy). People close to the program described more simply what the rover told us: "My battery is weak and it is getting dark."
Each mission is more than robotic equipment exploring nearly five minutes of light, it's a team of people. For questioning scientists and engineers who built and used the material to find answers, "Oppy" was now part of their family.
Keri Bean uplink tactical thread tattooed "(tau) = 10.8", the final measure of the amount of sunlight reaching the solar cells on his arm. As a meteorological student, Bean, a storm hunter, joked that the rover was chasing the dust devils and the dust storm that finally ended the mission.
The tendency to anthropomorphize "Oppy" began early when Sofi Collis, a 9-year-old immigrant, won a writing contest to name the MER rovers before their launch in 2003. She wrote about dark, cold nights and lonely in a Siberian orphanage: "I looked up at the glittering sky and I felt better. I dreamed that I could fly there. In America, I can realize all my dreams. Thank you for the spirit and the opportunity. "
"Oppy" has established endurance records, traveling more than 28 km to make deliveries over 50 times during the main 90-Sol missions, thanks to people dedicated to their survival. She developed a robotic form of arthritis when a small motor of her robotic arm began to stall. Years later, his memory began to falter and an embedded software began to report pains in the front and center right wheels.
Engineers used the MER Surface System Testbed, its land twin, better known as "Dusty", to find solutions to these aging problems and keep science flowing. These efforts continued to be demonstrated at the Scientific Operations Working Group (SOWG) meetings, during which scientific operations were planned each day.
At the last GTSO meeting I attended at JPL, the mobile device driver Paolo Bellutta periodically leaned back to translate phrases such as "hello," with the arm raised to free him from the panoramic camera. , indispensable since 2012. Paolo et son The team has also developed rear driving techniques to help reduce wheel stress.
"I come from Italy, but do not joke about driving," he adds.
On February 12, members of the mission team, past and present, gathered at the JPL's Space Flight Operations Facility, JPL's Mission Control for its interplanetary missions and space. Thomas Zurbuchen, Associate Administrator of NASA, and Steve Squyres, Opportunity's lead investigator, watch Bean send the final orders, then wait for an answer that everyone knew was unlikely to come.
The flow of data started like others, with a waking song. Squyres selected the final song, "I'll see you" from Billie Holiday. Previous selections during the long rover contact vigil included Tom Petty's "I Won's Back Down" and Kansas's "Dust in the Wind".
While they waited, Bean, a big fan of Star Wars, unveiled what Dr. Tanya Harrison, a global geologist, described as "emotional support". Harrison called the gesture "a beautiful reminder that these robotic missions, in principle, are totally human," in his account of the evening in Medium.
About 30 minutes later, the quartet came from the giant parabola at NASA's Deep Space communications facility 100 miles northwest of Goldstone, California. it never happened.
Project leader John Callas thanked the Deep Space network technicians "for more than fifteen and a half years of exceptional support, from launch to evening." Operators in Canberra responded "The MER project is offline" and this has been done.
The opportunity team met again after the press conference to celebrate the mission. The Mars InSight team had randomly chosen the same Pasadena restaurant to celebrate the successful deployment of the final instrument in this recently landed mission. By the time the two teams came together, Dr. Fred Calef, officially an expert in geospatial information for the Mars Curiosity mission, more commonly known as "Mars Earth Guard Cards," said, "This is how the things are happening. The exploration of Mars continues. "
Tony Rice is a volunteer with the NASA / JPL Solar System Ambassador Program and Software Engineer at Cisco Systems. You can follow him on Twitter @rtphokie.
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