Sky & Telescope - USA (2019-09)

The Little Rover That Could

28 SEPTEMBER 2019 • SKY & TELESCOPE

planned the previous day was successful

and you see a new piece of Mars,” he says.

Already, many team members are

planning their next move. Some have

been lucky enough to fi nd jobs on other

Martian projects, like Curiosity, the

Insight lander, and the upcoming Mars

2020 rover. But now they have to bid

farewell to the team, too. “Opportunity

is metal, glass, and silicon,” Seibert says.

“But the team that became a family

to operate it — that’s what everyone is

going to miss.”

Legacy Left Behind

But while mourning Opportunity, the

team is also celebrating her achievements.

Opportunity and Spirit bounced

onto Mars in January 2004, but their

life expectancies were dramatically short. Engineers esti-

mated that the rovers only had three months before so much

dust accumulated on their solar panels that they both failed

from lack of power.

Mars, however, intervened: Gusts of wind repeatedly wiped

the solar panels clean and boosted power levels back up. That

allowed Spirit to last for 6 years and Opportunity to last for

more than 14. Their unexpectedly lengthy lifetimes allowed

them to transform our vision of Mars.

Before the rovers tumbled onto the Red Planet, scientists

had only seen signs from orbit that Mars had hosted liquid

water in the past. But Opportunity’s fi rst image revealed

layered bedrock, which the team determined was probably

sediments laid down by water.

Then, Opportunity stumbled upon tiny spherical grains,

fancifully called blueberries, embedded within the sandstone.

On Earth, similar orbs form when minerals dissolved in

acidic groundwater solidify again in a different form. It was

further evidence that Mars was once warm and wet.

“Then came the magnifi cent benefi t of the extended mis-

sion,” Callas says. “As we drove this rover kilometers away

from where we landed, we continued to see this evidence of

liquid water. We’re not just talking about a puddle or a pond,

but we’re talking about at least kilome-

ter-scale bodies of water on the surface.”

All in all, Opportunity drove more

than a marathon on Mars — a distance

that allowed the team to not only image

extensive features carved by long-gone

lakes but to actually drive back in time.

Eagle Crater, where Opportunity landed,

dates back to the Hesperian Period, 3.7

to about 3 billion years ago. In 2011

however, Opportunity reached Endeav-

our Crater, which formed in the Noa-

chian Period, 4.1 to 3.7 billion years ago. It’s the oldest period

yet studied on Mars.

Here Opportunity found signs of another ancient wet

environment, but with water less acidic and more favorable

to life. That fi nd, coupled with Spirit’s discovery of hydrother-

mal vents, paints a tantalizing early portrait of Mars. After

all, where there is both energy and water on Earth — such as

within the geysers of Yellowstone or the hydrothermal vents of

the ocean deep — there is life. Throw in the organic com-

pounds that Curiosity later found on Mars, and the Red Planet

seems to have once had everything organisms would need.

“You have the energy, you have the liquid water, you have

the neutral pH, you have the warm temperatures, you have

the thick atmosphere,” Callas says. “Boy, you don’t have to go

much further than that to say, ‘This is physically habitable to

support life as we know it.’”

Thanks to their extended forays, both rovers rewrote every

textbook on Mars — and that is surely cause for celebration.

Opportunity Lost

“I always thought there were only two honorable ways for a

mission like this to end,” says Steve Squyres (Cornell Univer-

sity), the principal investigator and godfather of the mission.

tFAREWELL Top: Mars Exploration Rovers

project manager John Callas makes the call

ending the Deep Space Network’s last listen for

Opportunity, February 12, 2019. Bottom: Former

mission manager Cindy Oda shares her experi-

ence working on the rover that same evening.

uTHE LAST HURRAH This last 360°

panorama of Perseverance Valley com-

bines 354 images taken from May 13

through June 10, 2018. That same day,

a global dust storm cut off the rover’s

communications with Earth. The valley

sits on the inner slope of Endeavour Cra-

ter’s rim, which rises in the distance. Had

the rover survived, it could have followed

the valley down to the crater fl oor.

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