Hear, hear!
We need to go there and bring it home. You done good, Rover. Thank you.
I picture it up there as being a little like Wall-E if he had been left alone to eventually run out of power as he was trying to do his job.
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I do too, but then I thought he was tired after such a long mission, and was going to sleep now. He will wake up when we land on Mars.
I’m getting as verklempt as everybody, but you need to see this: Ikea "Lamp" Commercial - Hi Res - YouTube
ESA made a whole series of animations about the Rosetta/Philae comet mission. Aimed at young children, they found a wider audience of sentimental old goats like me. Here’s the final one - watch to the end.
As my friend pointed out, the Voyagers are still going 40+ years later
Brian
To be fair Voyager is not being pounded by weather, was built to last a lot longer than 90 days and has a nuclear battery which keeps it going.
I can beat that …
While long dead, good old Vanguard I is still part of a network of old satellites that are used in baseline measurements of atmospheric density.
In a little over a month it will have been providing scientific data for 61 years.
There’s nothing else man made up there that’s older. (Well, it’s in a tie with its upper launch stage.)
Speak for yourself. I am unabashedly anthropomorphizing the heck out of those plucky rovers.
Goodnight, Opportunity. You will be missed.
Is there some chance that Opportunity will revive? I’m thinking of some favorable wind event removing enough dust from the solar panels that batteries can recharge.
Or is this inevitably final?
From an article from October of last year, prolonged deep cold can damage the batteries, such that even if some helpful Martian dust devil cleans off the solar panels (or has already done so), the rover will still never be able to re-start. From a couple of articles from back in 2007 there are probably other things that prolonged exposure to intense cold could have done to the electronics of the rovers. (Those two articles were talking about a previous dust storm, at a time when both Spirit and Opportunity were still operational–and in fact both rovers were able to recover from that one.)