</s>Drive along with the Opportunity rover and hear the voices of scientists and engineers behind the mission. Designed to run for 90 days, the exploration spanned more than 15 years from 2004 to 2019. Along the way, it discovered definitive proof of liquid water on ancient Mars and set the off-world driving record.

On Tuesday (February 13, 2019) NASA announced that its Mars Opportunity rover mission – one of the most successful and enduring feats of interplanetary exploration – at an end after almost 15 years exploring the surface of Mars.

The Opportunity rover stopped communicating with Earth when a severe Mars-wide dust storm blanketed its location in June 2018. After more than a thousand commands to restore contact, engineers in the Space Flight Operations Facility at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) made their last attempt to revive Opportunity on Tuesday, to no avail. The solar-powered rover’s final communication was received June 10, 2018.

It is because of trailblazing missions such as Opportunity that there will come a day when our brave astronauts walk on the surface of Mars. And when that day arrives, some portion of that first footprint will be owned by the men and women of Opportunity, and a little rover that defied the odds and did so much in the name of exploration.

Designed to last just 90 Martian days and travel 1,100 yards (1,000 meters), Opportunity vastly surpassed all expectations in its endurance, scientific value and longevity. In addition to exceeding its life expectancy by 60 times, the rover traveled more than 28 miles (45 km) by the time it reached its most appropriate final resting spot on Mars – Perseverance Valley.

The final transmission ended a multifaceted, eight-month recovery strategy in an attempt to compel the rover to communicate. John Callas,manager of the Mars Exploration Rover project at JPL, said in a statement:

Opportunity landed in the Meridiani Planum region of Mars on January 24, 2004, seven months after its launch from Cape Canaveral Air Force Station in Florida. Its twin rover, Spirit, landed 20 days earlier in the 103-mile-wide (166-km-wide) Gusev Crater on the other side of Mars. Spirit logged almost 5 miles (8 km) before its mission wrapped up in May 2011.

From the day Opportunity landed, a team of mission engineers, rover drivers and scientists on Earth collaborated to overcome challenges and get the rover from one geologic site on Mars to the next. They plotted workable avenues over rugged terrain so that the 384-pound (174-kilogram) Martian explorer could maneuver around and, at times, over rocks and boulders, climb gravel-strewn slopes as steep as 32-degrees (an off-Earth record), probe crater floors, summit hills and traverse possible dry riverbeds. Its final venture brought it to the western limb of Perseverance Valley.

– Set a one-day Mars driving record March 20, 2005, when it traveled 721 feet (220 meters).

 – Returned more than 217,000 images, including 15 360-degree color panoramas.

 – Exposed the surfaces of 52 rocks to reveal fresh mineral surfaces for analysis and cleared 72 additional targets with a brush to prepare them for inspection with spectrometers and a microscopic imager.

 – Found hematite, a mineral that forms in water, at its landing site.

 – Discovered strong indications at Endeavour Crater of the action of ancient water similar to the drinkable water of a pond or lake on Earth.

Steve Squyres, the scientific principal Investigator for the Mars Exploration Rovers, speaks about the mission and its significance.

All of the off-roading and on-location scientific analyses were in service of the Mars Exploration Rovers’ primary objective: To seek out historical evidence of the Red Planet’s climate and water at sites where conditions may once have been favorable for life. Because liquid water is required for life, as we know it, Opportunity’s discoveries implied that conditions at Meridiani Planum may have been habitable for some period of time in Martian history. Steve Squyres is principal investigator of the rovers’ science payload at Cornell University. He said:

All those accomplishments were not without the occasional extraterrestrial impediment. In 2005 alone, Opportunity lost steering to one of its front wheels, a stuck heater threatened to severely limit the rover’s available power, and a Martian sand ripple almost trapped it for good. Two years later, a two-month dust storm imperiled the rover before relenting. In 2015, Opportunity lost use of its 256-megabyte flash memory and, in 2017, it lost steering to its other front wheel.

Each time the rover faced an obstacle, Opportunity’s team on Earth found and implemented a solution that enabled the rover to bounce back. However, the massive dust storm that took shape in the summer of 2018 proved too much for history’s most senior Mars explorer.

Mars exploration continues. NASA’s InSight lander, which touched down on November 26, 2018 is just beginning its scientific investigations. The Curiosity rover has been exploring Gale Crater for more than six years. And, NASA’s Mars 2020 rover and the European Space Agency’s ExoMars rover both will launch in July 2020, becoming the first rover missions designed to seek signs of past microbial life on the Red Planet.

Bottom line: On February 13, 2019, NASA’s Opportunity rover ended its 15-year mission on Mars.</s>
• NASA’s Opportunity rover hasn’t phoned home in the months after a global dust storm tore across Mars.
• Officials at NASA are expected to announce the Martian robot’s presumed death on Wednesday.
• Now that both Opportunity and its identical-twin rover, Spirit, are silent, the longest-running Mars mission is history is over.
• Opportunity was supposed to last 90 days but survived on the red planet for nearly 15 years.

The longest-operating robot on the Martian surface has finally met its demise.

NASA has tried for months to contact its Opportunity rover on Mars, but the golf-cart-size robot has failed to phone home to Earth ever since a record global dust storm engulfed the red planet.

On Wednesday, the US space agency is expected to announce the end of Opportunity. Combined with the previous loss of its identical-twin Spirit rover, this signals the operational finale of the Mars Exploration Rovers program – the longest-running Mars mission in history.

Opportunity and Spirit landed on Mars in January 2004. Each robot was designed to last about 90 days on the Martian surface, but Spirit survived for more than six years and Opportunity for nearly 15 years. The latter rolled about a marathon’s worth of miles across the red planet’s surface.

Opportunity was last heard from in June, when regional dust storms began to tear across Mars.

“This is the worst storm Opportunity has ever seen, and we’re doing what we can, crossing our fingers, and hoping for the best,” Steve Squyres, a planetary scientist at Cornell University and leader of the rover mission, told the Planetary Society at the time.

Though Opportunity had weathered other Martian dust storms before, this particular tempest – which NASA called “one of the most intense” ever seen – blocked a record amount sunlight to the planet’s surface for an extended stretch of time.

It appears this was too much for the aging rover, which relies on solar energy to keep its electronics healthy.

The dust storm on Mars began to clear in late August.

With sunlight intensity growing, mission managers said at the time that Opportunity’s solar panels should (in theory) begin gathering enough sunlight to recharge the rover’s batteries. This prompted the team to begin attempts to contact the robot.

“If we do not hear back after 45 days, the team will be forced to conclude that the sun-blocking dust and the Martian cold have conspired to cause some type of fault from which the rover will more than likely not recover,” John Callas, the rover’s project manager at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, said on August 30.

That deadline passed in October, marking the end of an “active” campaign to contact Opportunity.

But the space agency did not immediately give up. In November, NASA started a 90-day effort of “passive” listening to see if the robot somehow woke up on its own.

Opportunity still did not respond, even as light intensity increased on the sun-facing hill where engineers had parked the rover before the storm.

Too much fine Martian dust likely coated Opportunity’s panels, and no winds came soon enough to sweep it off. This probably impaired the rover’s ability to store and use electrical energy.

Cold is a major threat on Mars, since temperatures can drop to -100 degrees Fahrenheit near the equator in the winter. Such cold can shrink bits of metal in electronic circuits and snap them.

While little buttons of nuclear material called plutonium-238 help keep Opportunity’s circuitry warm, they are well-decayed and not as hot as they used to be – and unable to protect the rover’s systems on their own.

Read more: NASA’s deep-space nuclear-power crisis may soon end, thanks to a clever new robot in Tennessee

Opportunity’s batteries were also very old, and the longer such batteries remain uncharged, the more electrical storage capacity they lose. This can lead to a sudden dip in voltage called a “brown out,” which puts the robot into an unrecoverable state.

Spirit – Opportunity’s sister rover – is presumed to have suffered the same fate in 2010. Engineers tried for more than a year to contact Spirit, but the rover never responded. NASA gave up trying to recontact the rover in May 2011 (during winter on Mars).

NASA is hosting a press conference at 2 p.m. EST on Wednesday to provide an update on Opportunity’s status. However, publicly accessible data from antennas that NASA uses to talk to Opportunity showed the agency’s last planned attempt to contact the rover failed.

“Goodbye old friend,” Mike Siebert, a scientist and NASA’s former driver of Opportunity, tweeted while sharing the data.

You can watch NASA’s live broadcast of the briefing using the YouTube player below.</s>PASADENA, Calif. — It’s time to say goodbye to Opportunity. The Mars rover’s team made its last attempt to contact Opportunity on Tuesday night, and it went unanswered. On Wednesday, NASA confirmed that the mission is over.

The agency held a news conference to detail the results of recovery efforts since a dust storm encircled Mars last year.

“For more than a decade, Opportunity has been an icon in the field of planetary exploration, teaching us about Mars’ ancient past as a wet, potentially habitable planet and revealing uncharted Martian landscapes,” said Thomas Zurbuchen, associate administrator for NASA’s Science Mission Directorate. “Whatever loss we feel now must be tempered with the knowledge that the legacy of Opportunity continues, both on the surface of Mars with the Curiosity rover and InSight lander and in the clean rooms of [NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory], where the upcoming Mars 2020 rover is taking shape.”

Solar-powered Opportunity hasn’t communicated with engineers since June 10. Dust has blocked out sunlight, and even the expected winds from November through January haven’t helped clear Opportunity’s sensors and panels. Engineers tried different things to revive Opportunity, sending repeated signals and commands to attempt to fix other potential issues. They’ve sent more than 835 recovery commands that remain unanswered.

“We have made every reasonable engineering effort to try to recover Opportunity and have determined that the likelihood of receiving a signal is far too low to continue recovery efforts,” said John Callas, manager of the Mars Exploration Rover project at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory.

The team is grateful for the long mission but sad to say goodbye. “Science is an emotional affair. It’s a team sport, and that’s what we’re celebrating today,” Zurbuchen said.

When Opportunity’s twin, Spirit, became mired in soft soil in 2009 and its five working wheels couldn’t free the rover, NASA held a “service” to commemorate the end of the mission in May 2011.

“Oppy,” as the rover is affectionately known, has well outlasted her original 90-day mission. Instead, the rover has persisted for 15 years, sending back incredible data and photos from Mars to help uncover the Red Planet’s secrets.

Opportunity and Spirit launched in 2003 and landed on Mars in 2004, searching for signs of ancient life.

Opportunity found hematite at its landing site: little round things all over the ground that looked like blueberries. These features form in water, a definitive sign to NASA that liquid water had been on the surface of Mars.

Opportunity was expected to travel 1,100 yards over 90 days on Mars. Instead, it traveled 28 miles.

It landed in Eagle Crater, moved on to Endurance Crater and planned to visit Victoria Crater. But the rover got stuck in the dunes of windblown material on the Martian surface. The engineers put it in reverse and “gunned it” to free the rover.

Opportunity was able to visit Victoria and spend two years driving around it and inside it before moving on to Endeavour Crater and ending in Perseverance Valley.

Opportunity’s mission has led to many discoveries about the Red Planet, but perhaps the most exciting was when the rover found evidence that Mars once had water and supported conditions for sustaining microbial life.

“From the get-go, Opportunity delivered on our search for evidence regarding water,” said Steve Squyres, principal investigator of the rovers’ science payload at Cornell University. “And when you combine the discoveries of Opportunity and Spirit, they showed us that ancient Mars was a very different place from Mars today, which is a cold, dry, desolate world. But if you look to its ancient past, you find compelling evidence for liquid water below the surface and liquid water at the surface.”

Opportunity not only leaves behind a legacy of discovery, it became the longest-running rover and captured 217,594 raw images.

It will probably stay where it fell silent in Perseverance Valley. There, a historic global dust storm blackened the skies and starved its batteries of energy. The team listened for the rover every day, worrying as the skies continued to darken and the temperatures dropped. But the historic storm proved to be too much for Opportunity.

“I cannot think of a more appropriate place for Opportunity to endure on the surface of Mars than one called Perseverance Valley,” said Michael Watkins, director of JPL. “The records, discoveries and sheer tenacity of this intrepid little rover is testament to the ingenuity, dedication and perseverance of the people who built and guided her.”

This is the last image the panoramic camera captured before the rover communicated to engineers that its power was running low and that the dusty conditions were making things quite dark.

But Opportunity had shown other signs of age. It had a heater that was draining energy, and the clock was scrambled by loss of power, so it didn’t know when to sleep. Then, the flash memory stopped, so the team had to recover the rover’s data every day before it “forgot” what it saw.

Meanwhile, the Curiosity rover, which was unaffected by the storm, and the stationary InSight lander continue to study the Red Planet and carry on missions of discovery that were founded by Opportunity and Spirit.

On Tuesday, InSight deployed its “mole,” or heat flow probe, on the Martian surface, and in the coming weeks, it will be the first probe to go more than 16 feet below the surface. This will determine Mars’ subsurface temperature and thermal conductivity.

InSight also shared a fond farewell to Opportunity on Twitter.

On Wednesday, Opportunity’s team bid her farewell while looking to the foundations the mission laid.

“When I think of Opportunity, I will recall that place on Mars where our intrepid rover far exceeded everyone’s expectations,” Callas said. “But what I suppose I’ll cherish most is the impact Opportunity had on us here on Earth. It’s the accomplished exploration and phenomenal discoveries. It’s the generation of young scientists and engineers who became space explorers with this mission. It’s the public that followed along with our every step. And it’s the technical legacy of the Mars Exploration Rovers, which is carried aboard Curiosity and the upcoming Mars 2020 mission.

And one day, NASA hopes rover tracks will be alongside human footprints on the Red Planet.

“It is because of trailblazing missions such as Opportunity that there will come a day when our brave astronauts walk on the surface of Mars,” NASA Administrator Jim Bridenstine said. “And when that day arrives, some portion of that first footprint will be owned by the men and women of Opportunity and a little rover that defied the odds and did so much in the name of exploration.”</s>NASA's Opportunity rover, the third robotic wanderer to land on Mars, changed our understanding of the Martian landscape, geology, atmosphere and history. On Wednesday, NASA announced its mission complete and with it, the rover's life officially over. The plucky robot roamed the Martian surface for approximately 5,515 Earth days, just over 15 years.

During a press conference, NASA said that Opportunity hadn't responded to a last-ditch effort Tuesday to establish contact. A planet-encircling dust storm cut off communications with Opportunity on June 10, 2018, preventing its solar panels from storing power. Since then, over 830 rescue commands had been beamed to the rover.

On Tuesday night, despite the transmission of commands and Billie Holiday's I'll Be Seeing You to Mars via the Deep Space Network, the rover couldn't be roused.

"I learned this morning that we had not heard back," Thomas Zurbuchen, associate administrator of NASA's Science Mission Directorate, said during a press conference.

"It is therefore that I am standing here with a sense of deep appreciation and gratitude [and] I declare the opportunity mission as complete," he concluded.

NASA Administrator Jim Bridenstine shared his thoughts on Twitter, as did many emotional space fans.

Opportunity's story is one of resilience, discovery and wonder. It's a record-breaker, a testament to the prowess of the engineers, scientists and leaders at NASA who built, worked on and piloted the rover for over 14 years. Its final resting spot lies on the western edge of the Endeavour crater, in a gully the science team dubbed Perseverance Valley.

The rover launched on July 7, 2003, and landed in Meridiani Planum on Mars on Jan. 25, 2004. Its original mission was intended to last just over three months, but the hardy rover continued to roam across the Martian soil for nearly 15 years, traveling 28.06 miles (around 45 kilometers) -- the farthest distance achieved by any extra-planetary robot.

It was the second of twin rovers sent to the planet in 2003 as part of the Mars Exploration Rover (MER) mission. The first rover, Spirit, became stuck in a sand trap in 2009. NASA officially announced its mission complete in 2011.

Opportunity made several landmark discoveries on Mars, chancing upon the first meteorite found on another planet, revealing that Meridiani Planum was once immersed in water, studying over 100 impact craters and delivering countless stunning panoramas of a planet nearly 34 million miles away.

After landing in 2004, the golf-cart-sized robot began its journey to Endurance crater, spending six months performing an extensive investigation of the bedrock and sand dunes. Opportunity would move on to study the roughly half-mile-wide (730 meters) Victoria crater between 2006 and 2008, revealing how water had entered and left the region billions of years ago.

In 2011, it reached Endeavour, an impact crater 13.7 miles wide, after three years of travel. It discovered a bright mineral vein of gypsum. At the time, Steve Squyres, a principal investigator on the mission, said, "This tells a slam-dunk story that water flowed through underground fractures in the rock." It also snapped an image of the infamous "dust devils," whirlwinds that occasionally arise on the Martian surface.

Its journey was not without some scares. In 2005, Opportunity got mired in a dune -- a fate that had crippled and eventually claimed its robotic twin. On Earth, NASA worked to mimic the Martian soil before executing careful maneuvers to free Opportunity. The rover weathered its first dust storm in 2007, wrestled with intermittent wheel problems and labored with a problematic robotic arm throughout its expedition.

Still, it seemed that nothing could knock out the intrepid robotic explorer. On its 5,000th Martian day, it celebrated with its first selfie.

Opportunity will remain dormant in Perseverance Valley, occasionally being spied by a passing orbiter -- or perhaps, in the distant future, retrieved and idolized as a pioneer that pointed the way for the first humans to reach, and even settle on, Mars.

"It is because of trailblazing missions such as Opportunity that there will come a day when our brave astronauts walk on the surface of Mars," Bridenstine said.

The robot is survived by NASA's Curiosity rover, which remains the only active rover on the Martian surface. It will be joined by NASA's planned Mars 2020 rover and Rosalind Franklin, the European Space Agency's rover, set to launch in 2020.

NASA turns 60: The space agency has taken humanity farther than anyone else, and it has plans to go further.

Taking It to Extremes: Mix insane situations -- erupting volcanoes, nuclear meltdowns, 30-foot waves -- with everyday tech. Here's what happens.</s>Opportunity bounced to a stop on the Martian surface in 2004 and roamed from crater to crater for 14 years.

A huge dust storm that wrapped around the planet last June covered the rover’s solar panels and left engineers struggling for months to regain contact.

Opportunity survived 5,111 Martian days and drove over 28 miles — a distance record for wheeled vehicles beyond Earth.

Opportunity weathered many storms over its 14 years. For example, the red dust that camouflaged the rover in early 2014:

… had mostly blown away two months later:

A self portrait taken on Opportunity’s 5,000th Martian day showed the rover, about the size of a golf cart, glinting in the sunlight.

But the huge storm that hit in June 2018 obscured the sun for days and blanketed the rover with dust and grit.

One of Opportunity’s final images shows its robotic arm at work in Perseverance Valley, a week before the storm.

Five months after Opportunity went silent, NASA landed another spacecraft on Mars.

The InSight lander does not rove as Opportunity did, but will instead stand still and probe the inner structure of the planet. Explore Mars and InSight in augmented reality.</s>NASA has officially declared an end to the mission of the six-wheeled rover on Mars. Opportunity lost power in a dust storm last June, and all efforts to make contact have failed.

"Our beloved Opportunity remained silent," Thomas Zurbuchen, associate administrator for NASA's Science Mission Directorate, said Wednesday at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif. "With a sense of deep appreciation and gratitude," he added, "I declare the Opportunity mission as complete."

The plucky robot operated on the red planet for more than 14 years — an astonishing achievement, given that the mission was technically supposed to last only 90 days. The rover drove more than 25 miles, returned thousands of pictures and changed the way scientists think about Mars.

On landing day in January 2004, scientists were positively giddy about what they saw in the first pictures Opportunity sent after touching down at Meridiani Planum.

"I will attempt no science analysis because it looks like nothing I've ever seen before in my life," rover principal investigator Steven W. Squyres said during a news conference at JPL shortly after landing. "We knew, going into this, at a fine scale the texture of Meridiani Planum was unlike almost anything else on Mars. As we had expected ..."

Squyres stopped mid-sentence to gawk at a new picture of the landing site that had just appeared on a monitor screen.

"Holy smokes," he exclaimed. "I'm sorry, I'm just blown away by this."

In the weeks, then months, then years following landing, Squyres appeared at numerous news conferences to talk about the rover's scientific discoveries. Asked last summer to share two of his favorites, he said, "OK, I'll give you two. The first was right at the beginning at the landing site."

That's when Opportunity found evidence that briny water once sloshed around on the surface of what is now a very dry planet.

The second "was years and years later [when] we got to the rim of a very ancient crater," Squyres said. The robot found evidence of what's called hydrothermal events in which hot water percolates through rocks and changes their mineral content.

But last summer, the planet that gave up so many of its secrets smothered the rover.

On May 30, NASA's Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter spotted a dust storm heading toward Opportunity's location near the equator. Over the next few days, the enormous storm swirled over the entire planet, covering Opportunity's solar panels with dust.

"The storm is one of the most intense ever observed on the Red Planet. As of June 10, it covered more than 15.8 million square miles (41 million square kilometers) — about the area of North America and Russia combined," NASA said at the time. "It has blocked out so much sunlight, it has effectively turned day into night for Opportunity, which is located near the center of the storm, inside Mars' Perseverance Valley."

Her power dropped to a trickle, and she was last heard from on June 10.

"I made the decision to declare a spacecraft emergency because there wasn't enough energy for the rover to sustain activities," John Callas, Opportunity's project manager, told NPR.

"Prior to this storm, the vehicle was in, actually, remarkably good health," Callas said.

Mission managers weren't exactly sure what was wrong with the rover. Opportunity survived a planet-wide dust storm in 2007 — but this time, with so little power, the rover might not have been able to protect electronic instruments from damage during the cold Martian nights.

Instead of waiting for the rover to wake up on its own, managers have spent the past several months pinging Opportunity with commands. But she remained silent and still in Perseverance Valley.

On Tuesday, scientists at JPL announced that there would be one final attempt to ping the rover.

Keri Bean was among those who helped send that last radio signal. Losing Opportunity, she says, is like a death in the family.

Bean was in high school when she saw a documentary about Opportunity called Roving Mars. "I especially remember them showing the landing footage," she says. "And when they got the confirmation the spacecraft landed they were all cheering, they were so excited. And I was really drawn to the idea of exploring and being so interested and caring about something that much."

Bean went to graduate school at Texas A&M University where she worked on the rover as a student, and ultimately landed a job at JPL where she joined the Opportunity mission team. She says losing the rover is like a death in the family.

"Me, personally, it's been really hard because this is a project I've worked on for over a third of my life at this point," Bean says. "And so just to lose that all of a sudden is really tough. But at least it was Mars that killed her — it wasn't the rover failing or something else. It was Mars. And I feel like that's really the only appropriate death for her at this point."

NASA still has one rover operating on Mars. Curiosity landed in 2012 and is currently climbing up Mount Sharp, a three-mile-high mound in the middle of Gale Crater. Curiosity is nuclear powered, so dust storms don't interfere with its power supply.

The space agency plans to send another rover to Mars in 2020.</s>In a press briefing, NASA announced the end of the mission after more than 800 attempts to contact the Mars rover Opportunity.

It looks as if the Mars rover Opportunity has finally reached its end after 15 years on the Red Planet. After an intense storm hit the rover last June, Opportunity went silent. Since September, the team at NASA has been using a “sweep and beep” process to try to contact the robot, which involves sending commands and waiting to hear a beep back. We haven’t heard one.

NASA announced yesterday that the team would be putting in its final efforts to contact the rover last night, and would announce the results today. But it doesn’t look good.

We could see the final uplink commands being sent through the Deep Space Network, the global network of communications facilities that helps NASA send messages to its spacecraft.

But tweets from the people in the control room last night suggest that those attempts were met with silence.

We’re still awaiting official word from NASA in the form of a press briefing at 11 a.m. PST (2 p.m. EST), but it seems certain that this is the end for the rover.

The team was hoping that the windy season on Mars would help clear off Opportunity’s solar panels, allowing it to power up again. But now, after months of trying, winter is approaching.

We said goodbye to Opportunity’s companion rover, Spirit, back in 2011 which stopped communicating with NASA on March 22, 2010 (see “Goodbye, Spirit: An Explorer of the Red Planet”). Spirit and Opportunity landed on opposite sides of the planet in 2004.

In its time on Mars, Opportunity provided data that helped advance our understanding of our planetary neighbor. It has traveled over 45 kilometers, sending back a treasure trove of images, and discovered the first signs of ancient ice.

But this is by no means the end of science on Mars. The legacy lives on in the form of Curiosity and InSight. The Curiosity rover, which landed on Mars in 2012, is still helping researchers uncover how certain craters and mountains formed, while the InSight probe is on the hunt for Marsquakes.</s>A massive dust storm which engulfed the surface of Mars has knocked out the Opportunity Rover, according to NASA. The US-based space agency has been attempting to re-establish a connection with the remote-controlled robot, which has been up on the planet since 2011. Originally, it was being used to determine whether the surface of Mars would be able to support microbial life, providing clues as to whether it was once inhabited. Some 17 missions have landed on Mars to gather information and samples, and NASA is planning another three in the future.

Will NASA pull the plug on the Opportunity Mars mission? The Opportunity rover has been on Mars’ surface for almost a decade, taking energy from sunlight via built-in solar panels. The dust storm which recently swept Mars’ atmosphere meant it was unable to absorb sunlight, and as a result has gone offline. Officials at NASA have issued hundreds of commands from their base in California, but have so far received no reply.

In their latest update for the rover, NASA said: “No signal from Opportunity has been heard since Sol 5111 (June 10, 2018) during the historic global dust storm. “Opportunity likely experienced a low-power fault, a mission clock fault (the rover has no sense of time) and an up-loss timer fault (loss of contact with Earth causing communication issues). “The team is continuing to listen for the rover over a broad range of times, frequencies and polarisations using the Deep Space Network (DSN) Radio Science Receiver. “Since the loss of signal, over 835 recovery commands have been radiated to the rover.”

Mike Seibert, a former Opportunity flight director has said Opportunity’s unresponsiveness means the end of its landmark mission. He said: “It’s the end of the first great Martian road trip.” However, officials are not looking on the mission with disappointment, instead focussing on the machine’s surprising longevity. Originally, the rovers were expected to be almost disposable, lasting for six months at a time to gather samples and data, but they far outlasted their proposed lifespan.</s>A final attempt to contact the Mars rover “Opportunity” after it was lost in a dust storm failed.

“I learned this morning that we had not heard back,” Thomas Zurbuchen, associate administrator of NASA’s Science Mission Directorate, said during a press conference.

“It is therefore that I am standing here with a sense of deep appreciation and gratitude [and] I declare the Opportunity mission as complete,” he concluded.

Opportunity’s been silent since June when it got caught up in a Martian dust storm.

The space agency made a final attempt to rouse the rover Tuesday night.

The golf cart-sized rover landed on Mars in January of 2004.

Opportunity and its twin rover Spirit have sent back volumes of valuable information about Mars over the past 15 years.
The mission of NASA's Opportunity rover on Mars comes to an end. The rover stopped communicating in June 2018 after a Martian dust storm, and attempts to reestablish communications have not been successful.