That was the sad final message from NASA’s NASA’s Opportunity rover rover before it went silent on the dusty surface of Mars. After exploring the Red Planet for nearly more than15 years—far beyond its expected 90-day mission the rover was caught in a massive dust storm that blocked sunlight from reaching its solar panels to charge to.
Alone, 225 million kilometers from Earth, it whispered those haunting final words. A machine built for science gave us poetry. And with that, one of humanity’s greatest explorers fell silent forever on the surface of Red Planet.
NASA’s Opportunity Mars rover was built to operate for just 90 days but it kept going for 15 years. NASA officially already declared it dead on Red Planet and its last message to scientists before it went dark eight months ago is getting a lot of attention.
The rover spent a decade and a half sending data to us not words. Science reporter Jacob Margolis, scientists at NASA said the last message they received from Opportunity effectively translated to, “My battery is low and it’s getting dark.”
Flight controllers tried numerous times to make contact, and sent one final series of recovery commands Tuesday night along with one last wake-up song, Billie Holiday’s “I’ll Be Seeing You,” in a somber exercise that brought tears to team members’ eyes. There was no response from space, only silence.
The project manager John Callas said, “This is a hard day, Even though it’s a machine and we’re saying goodbye, it’s still very hard and very poignant, but we had to do that. We came to that point.”
NASA did all the possible options to wake it up. NASA published their “Opportunity, Wake Up!” song on Spotify including ‘Here Comes the Sun’ by The Beatles, ‘Telephone Line’ by Electric Light Orchestra, ‘I Will Survive’ by Gloria Gaynor, ‘I Won’t Back Down’ by Tom Petty, ‘Wake Me Up Before You Go-Go’ by Wham and ‘Life On Mars’ by David Bowie.
The Opportunity rover was travelling and exploring Red Planet in Perseverance Valley and fittingly. When the intense dust storm in decades hit and then contact with us was lost. The storm and dust were so massive that it darkened the sky for months so that the solar panels couldn’t get sunlight to power it.
When the sky finally cleared, rover went in silent, its internal clock possibly was useless that it no longer knew when to sleep or wake up to receive commands. Flight controllers sent more than 1,000 recovery commands but all went in vain.
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Opportunity was the fifth of eight spacecraft to successfully land on Mars so far all belonging to NASA. Only two remain working: the nuclear-powered Curiosity rover, prowling around since 2012, and the recently arrived InSight, placed a heat-sensing, self-hammering probe on the dusty red surface to burrow deep into the planet like a mole.