Opportunity Hits What Should Have Been a Goal
After becoming, on May 15, the record holder for the longest distance driven anywhere other than on Earth by a NASA vehicle, Opportunity passed another milestone on June 24, when it exceeded 37 kilometers of total odometry. Based on the numbers we’ve known for the past 40 years, this should have made it pass Lunokhod 2 and set the overall record for longest distance driven by a vehicle anywhere other than on Earth, so it should have been a pretty big day.
Well, it’s not, because the Russians recently, and very conveniently, remembered to recalculate the distance covered by Lunokhod 2 and the new result is a staggering 42 kilometers, five more than before. As such, especially considering that Opportunity is almost nine and a half years into its planned three-month mission, the technical problems keep piling up, some new ones being mentioned even in the update that marked passing the 37 kilometer mark, its next winter haven is only about one kilometer away and the focus has now switched to Curiosity, it may well be that it’ll never officially become the vehicle that drove the most anywhere other than on Earth. At the same time, if it will somehow make it through yet another Martian winter in a state that’ll permit further long-distance driving, those same issues that increasingly limit its relevance and usefulness from a scientific perspective may just make the mission managers simply decide that it should be driven until it’ll hit the new goal, just to at least have the record under its belt for a while, before Curiosity has a chance to snatch it away.
What’s interesting when you look at this otherwise rather amusing effort made by Russian scientists 40 years after Lunokhod 2 ceased operating is that it clearly states that there’s still a space race going on. Unfortunately, most of the world’s governments, and the United States’ one in particular, definitely think otherwise when they set goals and budgets and, unless something changes immediately and drastically, several more decades will have to pass before we’ll have any chance of matching even the ambitions, much less the achievements, we had during the ’60s and ’70s, clearly not when also “updating” those goals according to our current level of technological development.
