Tag: Opportunity rover

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Lessons from a 15-year Mars rover mission

Steve Squyres
Planetary scientist Steve Squyres, who headed the science team for NASA’s Spirit and Opportunity rovers and now serves as Blue Origin’s chief scientist, demonstrates how the rovers were parked on slanted slopes to soak up maximum solar energy during the Martian winter. (GeekWire Photo / Alan Boyle)

STATE COLLEGE, Pa. — For 15 years, planetary scientist Steve Squyres’ life revolved around Mars, with good reason. He was the principal investigator for one of the longest-running NASA missions on the surface of another world, executed by the twin rovers Spirit and Opportunity.

If anyone has a sense of the lay of the land on the Red Planet, it’d be Squyres. So what does he think of the idea of setting up permanent cities on Mars?

“My take on this one is no, I don’t think so,” Squyres said here today at Penn State University during the ScienceWriters 2019 conference.

He’s not opposed to sending people to Mars. Far from it. “Human research base? Absolutely, as soon as possible,” Squyres said. It’s even possible that super-rich tourists will want to travel to Mars and back, he said.

But based on the problems that Spirit and Opportunity encountered during their longer-than-anticipated operating life on the Red Planet, plus Squyres’ experience as a researcher in Antarctica and Norway’s Svalbard archipelago, he isn’t convinced that Mars can ever be a place to raise a family.

“Antarctica is international territory,” he said. “If you want to build a home, if you want to go homesteading, set up shop, build a community, build a town, nobody’s going to stop you. … And yet, nobody does it. Why? Antarctica is a terrible place, it really is. And Mars is just so much worse.”

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Mars rover scientist switches over to Blue Origin

Steve Squyres
Cornell astronomer Steve Squyres, the principal investigator for the Mars Exploration Rovers, will become Blue Origin’s chief scientist. (Cornell University Photo)

Just months after closing out the 15-year-long Opportunity rover mission on Mars, Cornell University astronomer Steve Squyres is taking advantage of a new opportunity: the post of chief scientist at Amazon billionaire Jeff Bezos’ Blue Origin space venture.

Today Blue Origin confirmed that Squyres, 63, will be joining the company, which is headquartered in Kent, Wash.

Squyres has been involved in NASA space missions including Voyager’s trip past the solar system’s giant planets and Magellan’s voyage to Venus. But his main claim to fame is his stint as principal investigator for the Mars Exploration Rovers.

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NASA sings requiem to Opportunity rover

Opportunity rover
Ths colorized image of the Opportunity rover’s shadow was taken on July 26, 2004, by the rover’s front hazard-avoidance camera as it moved farther into Endurance Crater in the Meridiani Planum region of Mars. (NASA / JPL-Caltech Photo)

After months of silence from Mars, NASA finally read the rites over its Opportunity rover, hailing the six-wheeled machine as an overachiever that found some of the first and best evidence of the Red Planet’s warmer, wetter past.

The solar-powered rover’s demise was no surprise: It fell out of contact with controllers at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif., last June — due to a globe-girdling Martian dust storm that kept Opportunity from charging its batteries.

Mission managers tried all sorts of tricks to wake up the comatose rover and re-establish communications, but it was to no avail. The last attempt was made on the night of Feb. 12.

Today’s final Opportunity news briefing took on the trappings of a memorial service, featuring far more ceremony than NASA employed when the Spirit rover — Opportunity’s twin in the Mars Exploration Rover mission — went dead in 2011.

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Mini-probes fade into the sunset beyond Mars

MarCO view of Mars
This image of Mars was captured by one of NASA’s MarCO satellites from a distance of about 4,700 miles, about 10 minutes after the descent of NASA’s Mars InSight lander on Nov. 26, 2018. The grid seen on the right edge of the image is the spacecraft’s high-gain antenna. (NASA / JPL-Caltech Photo)

Farewell, WALL-E and EVE: NASA says it’s lost contact with two briefcase-sized MarCO nanosatellites, more than two months after their history-making Mars flyby.

And yet another robotic explorer, NASA’s Opportunity rover, has been mute on Mars for eight months, heightening suspicions that its 15-year watch could be at an end.

There’s still hope for Oppy: Mission managers at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory say they haven’t been able to rouse the golf-cart-sized robot since a global dust storm wiped kept it from recharging its solar-powered battery system last June. But with Martian winter closing in, they’ve just begun a new set of wakeup strategies.

There’s less hope for the two MarCO satellites, whose nicknames come from a couple of robotic characters in the Disney/Pixar animated film “WALL-E.”

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NASA’s Opportunity rover is seen but not heard

Opportunity on Mars
A high-resolution image from NASA’s Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter shows the Opportunity rover as a bright blip inside the white box. The box marks a 154-foot-wide area in Mars’ Perseverance Valley. Click on the image for a larger version. (NASA / JPL-Caltech / Univ. of Arizona Photo)

NASA’s Opportunity rover still hasn’t made contact after a weeks-long Martian dust storm forced it to go into hibernation, but at least the skies are now clear enough to spot the solar-powered robot from orbit.

And mission managers say they’re a long way from giving up on Opportunity, which began its work on the surface of Mars almost 15 years ago.

Oppy shows up as a blip on the slopes of Perseverance Valley in a color image captured Sept. 20 by the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter’s High Resolution Imaging Science Experiment, or HiRISE, from a height of 166 miles.

The orbiter’s clear view raises hopes that winds will sweep dust off Opportunity’s solar panels, as has happened several times before, and allow the rover to build up enough power to resume transmissions.

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Opportunity rover should wait out Martian storm

Opportunity rover
An artist’s conception shows NASA’s Opportunity rover under sunnier conditions. (NASA Illustration)

NASA has had to put its power-starved Opportunity rover into an induced coma on Mars, but that drastic maneuver — plus some luck — should be enough to save it from one of the worst dust storms ever observed on the Red Planet.

That doesn’t mean everything’s cool at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif., which has overseen the rover’s work on Mars for nearly 15 years.

“We have a very tight emotional connection with it,” John Callas, project manager for the Mars Exploration Rover mission, told GeekWire today during a teleconference.

“It’s like you have a loved one in a coma in the hospital,” he explained. “The doctors are telling you that, ‘OK, you’ve just got to give it time and she’ll wake up. All the vital signs are good, so it’s just waiting it out.’ But if it’s your 97-year-old grandmother, you’re going to be very concerned. And so we are.”

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NASA loses contact with Opportunity rover on Mars

Simulated sun on Mars
This series of images shows simulated views of a darkening Martian sky blotting out the sun from the Opportunity rover’s point of view, with the right side simulating Opportunity’s current view in the current dust storm. (NASA / JPL-Caltech / TAMU)

NASA’s Opportunity rover on Mars has lost touch with its handlers back on Earth, probably due to a low-power condition brought on by a chokingly thick dust storm. The storm is covering an area of 14 million square miles, or a quarter of the Red Planet, NASA said today in a mission update.

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