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.
A 2018 planet-wide dust storm caused a loss of comms with the Opportunity rover. Tonight, the @MarsRovers team will make the last planned attempts to communicate with the solar-powered rover. Join us tomorrow at 2pm ET as we share results of those efforts: https://t.co/332C7Vqk1H pic.twitter.com/Z4Rh8hckMh
— Thomas Zurbuchen (@Dr_ThomasZ) February 12, 2019
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.
There it is--the jagged line uplink with commands--WAKE UP OPPY https://t.co/EtVyX3kGFp pic.twitter.com/4enz4CPncr
— Shannon Stirone (@shannonmstirone) February 13, 2019
But tweets from the people in the control room last night suggest that those attempts were met with silence.
Spent the evening at JPL as the last ever commands were sent to the Opportunity rover on #Mars.
