Skip to main content

It's too late to give a farewell, but it's never too late to say goodbye - The Story of Opportunity - Science Feed

By

People say records are meant to be broken, but first, we have to make records then someone else would break it. Isn't it? The Opportunity Rover is that kind of thing we're talkin' bout, the rover that NASA Launched on July 7, 2003, as part of NASA's Mars Exploration Rover program, which is as planned to last 90-sol duration of activity (slightly more than 90 Earth days). But it gives 14 years of service which is a remarkable achievement. Opportunity landed in Meridiani Planum on January 25, 2004, three weeks after its twin Spirit (MER-A) touched down on the other side of the planet.
                                           

Opportunity didn't survive for over 14 years because its mission was easy. It encountered challenges that required its engineers to be resourceful. For instance, the rover's right-front wheel sometimes drew more current than the other wheels, so engineers often drove the rover backward to extend the right front wheel's life.
                                           

Opportunity was able to stay operational for 5111 sols after landing, maintaining its power and key systems through continual recharging of its batteries using solar power, and hibernating during events such as dust storms to save power. On April 26, 2005, Opportunity's wheels dug into a soft, wind-sculpted sand ripple and got stuck for several nail-biting weeks at Purgatory Dune. But after extensive testing in a Mars-like sandbox at JPL, the team was able to carefully shimmy out of the Martian sand trap.
                                           

In its record-breaking time on Mars, the rover drove more than 28 miles, finding some of the first definitive signs of past liquid water on the red planet's surface. Opportunity has been a fertile training ground for the many hundreds of engineers and planetary scientists who have learned at their robotic knees. A number have gone on to lead other space missions. Many of those currently operating Opportunity are sharing their expertise part-time with other missions exploring our solar system. For most, working on Spirit (Opportunity's twin) and Opportunity has been transformative.
                                           

Opportunity encountered two mission-threatening dust storms that blocked sunlight from reaching its solar panels. It survived a dust storm in 2007 by minimizing activities and maintaining enough power in its batteries to recover when the skies cleared. Unfortunately, the 2018 dust storm blotted out even more sunlight and kept the skies above Opportunity dark about a month longer.
                                           

At a press conference at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California, NASA bid farewell to the rover it placed on Mars on January 25, 2004: before Facebook, before the iPhone, and even before some of the scientists now in charge of it graduated high school.
                                              


NASA is planning to launch another Mars Rover this year, but it seems to be delayed because of a pandemic caused by Coronavirus. We will see what's going to happen very soon until then this is Science Feed saying goodbye to you all.


Read More :
NASA announces to launch a mission on Titan through Dragonfly - Science Feed

How NASA makes 3D visualization of an exploded star - Science Feed

Pandemics Before Coronavirus That Shook The Whole World - Science Feed

Popular posts from this blog

Theranos: A Complete Story - Science Feed

By
Theranos, the blood testing startup founded by Elizabeth Holmes that pulled off the biggest scam ever happened in the Silicon Valley. From 2003 to 2008 this company grew spectacularly, but as we all know whenever someone tries to have everything in the world someone else is waiting for them to grab them down to nothing just like what happened to Stratton Oakmont and it's very CEO Jordan Belfort . Stratton Oakmont was the biggest Wall Street firm till 1999 when Belfort accused of money laundering, stock market manipulation and fined for 190 million dollars. The same goes for Theranos, so lets begin from the beginning and see what was Theranos hiding in their vault. Elizabeth Holmes dropped out of Stanford at the age of 19 to start Theranos, which was then called Real-Time Cures. She was inspired both by her grandfather's medical career, and her summer 2003 internship at the Genome Institute of Singapore. Briefly after the internship she wrote up a patent application f...
Read more

What is Fermi Paradox? - Science Feed

By
Have you ever thought why we have not found any advanced intelligent organism yet? Or is there any other type of life form outside our planet Earth? These are the basic questions that come into mind when we talk about Fermi Paradox. Fermi Paradox Fermi paradox is the lack of compatibility or contradiction between the high chances of existence of extraterrestrial civilization in the universe and lack of evidence to find them or communicate with them. This was termed after the name of physicist Enrico Fermi. It casually came in head of Fermi during talk with his colleagues and he asked, "Where is everybody?". Early and Related Theories Before Fermi Enrico, the founding father of modern rocket science  Konstantin Eduardovich Tsiolkovsky, a  Russian scientist, proposed Zoo hypothesis. In Zoo hypothesis, it is speculated that the extraterrestrial civilization knows about our existence but instead of contacting us, they opt to do observation on us similar to animals in zoo.  Th...
Read more

Internet of Future - Quantum Internet

By
Have you ever wondered about how the Internet will look like in our future, how much powerful it will be, what are the various tasks it can do, etc. The answer to these questions is "Quantum Internet - Internet of Future". There are lots of reasons behind saying it is the Internet of Future. But before knowing the reasons, we should first understand - "What is Quantum Internet?". So, According to some experts,         The quantum internet is a network for transmitting qubits between distant locations. Hmm..., What are Qubits???                       Let me explain, When we use our classical computers, our information (more specifically our data) is processed or transferred in the units of 1 or 0, called "Bits". But in the case of quantum computers, it uses 1 or 0 or both at the same time (superposition state), named "Qubits"(sometimes quantum bit or qbit). Qubits are far more different from tra...
Read more