NASA Will Keep Trying to Revive the Mars Rover Silent Opportunity Through January

NASA's Opportunity March rover after all.

On Sept. 11, NASA began a 45-day "active listening" campaign in an attempt to rouse the solar-powered Opportunity, which went silent on June 10 after a storm plunged its surroundings into darkness.

The 45-day deadline passed late last week. A NASA will continue active listening – a strategy that can be used to reduce the number of times it is done – for several months at least, agency officials announced yesterday (Oct. 29). [Mars Dust Storm 2018: What It Means for Opportunity Rover]

"NASA will continue its current strategy for the future," NASA officials wrote in a mission update yesterday (Oct. 29).

"Winds could increase the chances of solar panels," they added. "The agency will reassess the situation in the January 2019 time frame."

The change in strategy comes in the commitment to keep pinging Opportunity. Mission team members and NASA officials had previously said they would continue to listen for any signal from the rover at least through January.

Opportunity landed on March in January 2004, a few weeks after its twin, Spirit. Both robots roamed around different parts of the Red Planet, and finding lots of such evidence.

Spirit and Opportunity's prime missions were pegged to last just three months, but the duo continued to explore Mars for years. Spirit last communicated with its handlers in 2010 and was declared dead a year later. (22 kilometers) Endeavor Crater, this is the place to be.

That goal was started by the time of the first day of the year. So the active listening started.

Opportunity has been through quite an ordeal, enduring bitterly cold. So it's possible that the venerable rover, which has covered the surface of another world, has to death or fall victim to some "fault mode" from which it can not recover.

But perhaps this opportunity is still alive, and is just waiting for a strong, dust-dislodging. We shall see.

Mike Wall's book on the search for alien life, "Out There" will be published on Nov. 13 by Grand Central Publishing. Follow him on Twitter @michaeldwall. Follow us @Spacedotcom gold Facebook. Originally published on Space.com.