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As the Martian dust storm on the planet's scale disappears, NASA scientists have redoubled their efforts to contact the 15-year-old rover Opportunity, which has been silent since June 10 .
Some scientists are beginning to feel worried, but a plan is in place. NASA's communications satellite network Wednesday, a period of 45 days of active listening during which they will send signals from Earth to Mars several times a day. Radio receivers will listen passively and continue until January 2019, at the earliest.
"I think we have a plan so that if the vehicle is alive, we hear about it," said Steve Squyres, principal investigator of Mars Exploration Rovers' Spirit and Opportunity in Gizmodo. "The question is whether she is alive."
Powerful dust storms occur on Mars every two or three years, but the most recent was perhaps one of the largest ever recorded, according to a NASA statement. What started as a small storm in May quickly swept the entire planet. The nuclear powered rover is doing well, but scientists were more concerned about how would opt solar opportunity, with the sun masked by thick dust.
It is not directly that the electric power kills the rover. Opportunity is equipped with a hot electronic box, or WEB, which stores temperature-sensitive equipment and ensures that it never falls below -40 Celsius (-40 F). But nighttime temperatures on Mars can reach less than -100 ° C (-148 F).
Squyres explained that each electronic piece inside the box was tested at -55 degrees Celsius and that the dust storm usually has a moderating effect on the temperature, which helps keep the nights warm. However, it is difficult to know how the equipment will behave at temperatures below -55 ° C, or how nearly 15 years of heating and cooling will change the ability of the components to withstand the cold.
NASA will actively listen to mobile – which means sending signals and waiting for a response – for a 45-day period that began this week. But that does not mean they give up after the end of the period. "If the vehicle is actually alive, he should wake up and talk to us alone," said Squyres. NASA will wait for a potential signal until at least January, because the dust may have covered the solar panels, and a swirling devil passing over could clear the panels and wake the mobile. Not likely, but maybe.
There are now conflicting emotions among scientists. Opportunity was an extremely successful mission that lasted nearly 15 years when it was planned for only 90 years. Squyres, who has been working on the rover mission since 1987, recalled the drinks and narration when the equally resilient rover Spirit died after six years of operation in 2010. But Opportunity, unlike Spirit, would be the end of his project. Still, he said, "I've always felt that there were two honorable ways to end the mission. It would be if we just had our rover out, and the other if Mars was killing him.
Opportunity made some important observations during his stay on the red planet. "We found the first sedimentary rocks showing traces of liquid water on Mars," Gizmodo Kirsten Siebach, a Martian geologist at Rice University, told Gizmodo. Then the vehicle drove a long way to another crater, where he could observe some of the oldest rocks on the planet and help understand what Mars once looked like. He traveled 25 miles across the Martian surface during his operation.
Despite largely outdated expectations, the loss of opportunity would be a loss for current science. "Opportunity is the only rover to explore the earliest era in the history of Mars, when strong evidence indicates that the planet was warmer and wetter and may not be like Earth at this time and when life began here, "Matthew Golombek, Mars Exploration Rover Science Project at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, told Gizmodo. Opportunity was doing more research by studying small gullies that appear to have been dug by liquid water nets. If Opportunity is lost, understanding how these gullies actually formed will be another problem that will not be solved yet.
Seibach explained that entire careers were built on opportunity data and that it is an asset to have multiple rovers. "If you land a mission on Earth in New York and try to understand what the whole earth is, you will have a biased perception," she said.
We have to cross our fingers and hope that the vehicle reaches us. But even if this is not the case, the Opportunity mission was a great success. "Before landing, I massively underestimated Mars," said Squyres. "It turned out that Mars is a lot more complicated and interesting than we had envisioned."
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