The Long lived Opportunity!

   The Long lived Opportunity!

Opportunities, who does not love them? Exciting MARS received an Opportunity in the form of Rover to study the planet. NASA had developed a robot in order to study and gather observations, and report back to Earth. It had a life span of 14 years from 2004 to 2018. It landed on MARS on January 25, 2004 three weeks after its twin Rover, Spirit.

Opportunity was designed to work only for just three months but surprisingly it worked for 14 long years while Spirit that was designed for similar life span as of Opportunity was alive for six years covering almost 5 miles. Oppy, the loving name given name to Opportunity was expected to cover for less than a mile over the Martian but it crossed all the expectation and positively lived on MARS for 28 miles.

Opportunity started developing in Eagle crater in 2004, travelling outward making its way to Endurance crater, later entering to Victoria crater. It then traveled to Endeavor crater, from which it made its way south along the Western rim. It made many measurements, completed different studies of rocks and smaller craters as well as panoramas. During its life tenure it transmitted 217,594 images which also including one Selfie. These twins proved the existence of water on MARS.

Rightly said life has two points: Start and an End. On 10th June 2018 MARS faced sever dust storm. This thus led to loss of power required for operations. Three months later the storm cooled down and NASA begun to connect to the child present there. It made all sincere efforts to check if it survived the storm but it failed to receive any signal back. After no response received from the neighboring planet for months, NASA officially declared Mission Opportunity as Complete on 13th February 2019. In this way Oppy was seen on Perseverance Valley, its final resting spot.

These twins provided us with evidences of some of the elements of life on the red planet. The world that is now deserted and lifeless may have some exciting facts hidden.