Ten Years on Mars for Opportunity!
If the information I can find is correct, this moment marks precisely ten years since Opportunity started its mission on Mars. That mission was supposed to last for 90 sols, so about 92 and a half days here on Earth, yet that little rover is still operational and producing new findings even now, after all this time. It could definitely do with a cleaning and certain systems and components have seen better days, but there haven’t been new problems and the known ones haven’t significantly worsened in quite some time, so there’s reason to hope that it’ll continue to work for plenty of time to come.
It’s currently winter for Opportunity, February 15 marking the winter solstice in the Martian southern hemisphere, so the conditions are particularly treacherous, but the rover seems to be handling them well enough so far. It’s the sixth Martian winter it has to weather, after all, so the crew operating it knows exactly what to do, even if the amount of dust covering the solar panels, so painfully obvious in the recent self-portrait, significantly limits the available power and therefore doesn’t allow it to accomplish nearly as much during these months as it would have done some years ago. But if it’ll make it through this darkest time of the year, the odds of these ten years turning into 11 or even 12, by which time it’ll be in the middle of another winter, are quite good.
Does make you wonder, doesn’t it? Here we are, proving that we can build something that operates, with no maintenance, for ten whole years in the harsh Martian environment, yet what’s built for use here on Earth tends to break down more and more quickly, just so people will need to keep buying replacements. Beyond the findings that it produces, beyond its scientific value, that little rover shows us what we can do when we truly want to.
