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An illustration from NASA shows what an opportunity on Mars would look like.
NASA
NASA's global network of radio antennas may well have detected signs of robotic life.
A signal received by DSS-54 in Spain gives hope that the opportunity may be preparing.
The Martian rover was silent June 10 in the middle of a dust storm that surrounds the planet which has dusted the rover's batteries, preventing its solar panels from collecting extra fruit juice. Since then, NASA has made numerous attempts to contact the rover, sometimes ping the little robot daily to see if that would answer. This was not the case, but NASA continued to hope that Opportunity would call home.
A bot account, @dns_status, which provides updates based on the JPL's Deep Space network, tweeted an update Thursday, suggesting that Opportunity could have emerged from its dust-induced sleep.
SSD 54 receives opportunity data at 11b / s.
LOCK OFF 1 MCD2– Deep Space Network (@dsn_status) November 15, 2018
Not much information, but it seems that the SSD-54 received the data from Opportunity around 13 hours. PST. This data was transmitted at a speed of 11 bytes per second.
This could be good news – or maybe nothing at all.
So be clear. It could be Oppy. It could also be a ghost – an expectation or a bearer of Mars Reconnaissance Orbit or Mars Odyssey. I hope Oppy. But be careful. Put all this forward, because it's a complicated search.
– Chris G – NSF (@ChrisG_NSF) November 15, 2018
This tweet comes from Chris Gebhardt, editor at NASA Spaceflight, who suggests caution. It is possible that the signal detected earlier on Thursday actually comes from one of the spacecraft orbiting Mars that sends data from an earlier date.
DSS-54 is a satellite dish – a large radio telescope – that is part of the Madrid Deep Space Communication Complex, located in Spain. It is part of NASA's Deep Space Network, which offers sites in Goldstone, USA, and Canberra, Australia. These sites monitor NASA's range of space and robotics explorers through our solar system.
We contacted the reaction propulsion laboratory of NASA, which runs the Deep Space Network, to obtain more information but we had not received a response at the time of writing.
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