NASA's long-lived Opportunity Mars rover has been silent since June 11 in the wake of a global dust storm that swept around the red planet, blotting out the sun and preventing the rover's batteries from recharging. Despite clearing skies, the rover has yet to wake up, but it's no longer out of sight.

In an image released Tuesday, Opportunity shows up as a small dot-like feature in a high-resolution image captured by the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter, showing the rover on the slopes of Perseverance Valley 166 miles below. Opportunity was slowly making its way down into the martian valley when the dust storm developed.

Launched in 2003, Opportunity bounced to an airbag-assisted landing in January 2004, kicking off a mission designed to last just three months. But the hardy spacecraft was still on the job 14 years later when it slipped into electronic hibernation after losing power.

NASA's Deep Space Network antennas are listening for any signals from Opportunity indicating an attempt to phone home and are now sending commands "in the blind" in hopes of helping the rover, if it is still able, to reset its internal clock and resume communications. </s> In a press briefing, NASA announced the end of the mission after more than 800 attempts to contact the Mars rover Opportunity.

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.

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.

But tweets from the people in the control room last night suggest that those attempts were met with silence.

We’re still awaiting official word from NASA in the form of a press briefing at 11 a.m. PST (2 p.m. EST), but it seems certain that this is the end for the rover.

The team was hoping that the windy season on Mars would help clear off Opportunity’s solar panels, allowing it to power up again. But now, after months of trying, winter is approaching.

We said goodbye to Opportunity’s companion rover, Spirit, back in 2011 which stopped communicating with NASA on March 22, 2010 (see “Goodbye, Spirit: An Explorer of the Red Planet”). Spirit and Opportunity landed on opposite sides of the planet in 2004.

In its time on Mars, Opportunity provided data that helped advance our understanding of our planetary neighbor. It has traveled over 45 kilometers, sending back a treasure trove of images, and discovered the first signs of ancient ice.

But this is by no means the end of science on Mars. The legacy lives on in the form of Curiosity and InSight. The Curiosity rover, which landed on Mars in 2012, is still helping researchers uncover how certain craters and mountains formed, while the InSight probe is on the hunt for Marsquakes. </s> A final attempt to contact the Mars rover “Opportunity” after it was lost in a dust storm failed.

“I learned this morning that we had not heard back,” Thomas Zurbuchen, associate administrator of NASA’s Science Mission Directorate, said during a press conference.

“It is therefore that I am standing here with a sense of deep appreciation and gratitude [and] I declare the Opportunity mission as complete,” he concluded.

Opportunity’s been silent since June when it got caught up in a Martian dust storm.

The space agency made a final attempt to rouse the rover Tuesday night.

The golf cart-sized rover landed on Mars in January of 2004.

Opportunity and its twin rover Spirit have sent back volumes of valuable information about Mars over the past 15 years. </s> A massive dust storm which engulfed the surface of Mars has knocked out the Opportunity Rover, according to NASA. The US-based space agency has been attempting to re-establish a connection with the remote-controlled robot, which has been up on the planet since 2011. Originally, it was being used to determine whether the surface of Mars would be able to support microbial life, providing clues as to whether it was once inhabited. Some 17 missions have landed on Mars to gather information and samples, and NASA is planning another three in the future.

Will NASA pull the plug on the Opportunity Mars mission? The Opportunity rover has been on Mars’ surface for almost a decade, taking energy from sunlight via built-in solar panels. The dust storm which recently swept Mars’ atmosphere meant it was unable to absorb sunlight, and as a result has gone offline. Officials at NASA have issued hundreds of commands from their base in California, but have so far received no reply.

In their latest update for the rover, NASA said: “No signal from Opportunity has been heard since Sol 5111 (June 10, 2018) during the historic global dust storm. “Opportunity likely experienced a low-power fault, a mission clock fault (the rover has no sense of time) and an up-loss timer fault (loss of contact with Earth causing communication issues). “The team is continuing to listen for the rover over a broad range of times, frequencies and polarisations using the Deep Space Network (DSN) Radio Science Receiver. “Since the loss of signal, over 835 recovery commands have been radiated to the rover.”

Mike Seibert, a former Opportunity flight director has said Opportunity’s unresponsiveness means the end of its landmark mission. He said: “It’s the end of the first great Martian road trip.” However, officials are not looking on the mission with disappointment, instead focussing on the machine’s surprising longevity. Originally, the rovers were expected to be almost disposable, lasting for six months at a time to gather samples and data, but they far outlasted their proposed lifespan. </s> PASADENA, Calif. — It’s time to say goodbye to Opportunity. The Mars rover’s team made its last attempt to contact Opportunity on Tuesday night, and it went unanswered. On Wednesday, NASA confirmed that the mission is over.

The agency held a news conference to detail the results of recovery efforts since a dust storm encircled Mars last year.

“For more than a decade, Opportunity has been an icon in the field of planetary exploration, teaching us about Mars’ ancient past as a wet, potentially habitable planet and revealing uncharted Martian landscapes,” said Thomas Zurbuchen, associate administrator for NASA’s Science Mission Directorate. “Whatever loss we feel now must be tempered with the knowledge that the legacy of Opportunity continues, both on the surface of Mars with the Curiosity rover and InSight lander and in the clean rooms of [NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory], where the upcoming Mars 2020 rover is taking shape.”

Solar-powered Opportunity hasn’t communicated with engineers since June 10. Dust has blocked out sunlight, and even the expected winds from November through January haven’t helped clear Opportunity’s sensors and panels. Engineers tried different things to revive Opportunity, sending repeated signals and commands to attempt to fix other potential issues. They’ve sent more than 835 recovery commands that remain unanswered.

“We have made every reasonable engineering effort to try to recover Opportunity and have determined that the likelihood of receiving a signal is far too low to continue recovery efforts,” said John Callas, manager of the Mars Exploration Rover project at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory.

The team is grateful for the long mission but sad to say goodbye. “Science is an emotional affair. It’s a team sport, and that’s what we’re celebrating today,” Zurbuchen said.

When Opportunity’s twin, Spirit, became mired in soft soil in 2009 and its five working wheels couldn’t free the rover, NASA held a “service” to commemorate the end of the mission in May 2011.

“Oppy,” as the rover is affectionately known, has well outlasted her original 90-day mission. Instead, the rover has persisted for 15 years, sending back incredible data and photos from Mars to help uncover the Red Planet’s secrets.

Opportunity and Spirit launched in 2003 and landed on Mars in 2004, searching for signs of ancient life.

Opportunity found hematite at its landing site: little round things all over the ground that looked like blueberries. These features form in water, a definitive sign to NASA that liquid water had been on the surface of Mars.

Opportunity was expected to travel 1,100 yards over 90 days on Mars. Instead, it traveled 28 miles.

It landed in Eagle Crater, moved on to Endurance Crater and planned to visit Victoria Crater. But the rover got stuck in the dunes of windblown material on the Martian surface. The engineers put it in reverse and “gunned it” to free the rover.

Opportunity was able to visit Victoria and spend two years driving around it and inside it before moving on to Endeavour Crater and ending in Perseverance Valley.

Opportunity’s mission has led to many discoveries about the Red Planet, but perhaps the most exciting was when the rover found evidence that Mars once had water and supported conditions for sustaining microbial life.

“From the get-go, Opportunity delivered on our search for evidence regarding water,” said Steve Squyres, principal investigator of the rovers’ science payload at Cornell University. “And when you combine the discoveries of Opportunity and Spirit, they showed us that ancient Mars was a very different place from Mars today, which is a cold, dry, desolate world. But if you look to its ancient past, you find compelling evidence for liquid water below the surface and liquid water at the surface.”

Opportunity not only leaves behind a legacy of discovery, it became the longest-running rover and captured 217,594 raw images.

It will probably stay where it fell silent in Perseverance Valley. There, a historic global dust storm blackened the skies and starved its batteries of energy. The team listened for the rover every day, worrying as the skies continued to darken and the temperatures dropped. But the historic storm proved to be too much for Opportunity.

“I cannot think of a more appropriate place for Opportunity to endure on the surface of Mars than one called Perseverance Valley,” said Michael Watkins, director of JPL. “The records, discoveries and sheer tenacity of this intrepid little rover is testament to the ingenuity, dedication and perseverance of the people who built and guided her.”

This is the last image the panoramic camera captured before the rover communicated to engineers that its power was running low and that the dusty conditions were making things quite dark.

But Opportunity had shown other signs of age. It had a heater that was draining energy, and the clock was scrambled by loss of power, so it didn’t know when to sleep. Then, the flash memory stopped, so the team had to recover the rover’s data every day before it “forgot” what it saw.

Meanwhile, the Curiosity rover, which was unaffected by the storm, and the stationary InSight lander continue to study the Red Planet and carry on missions of discovery that were founded by Opportunity and Spirit.

On Tuesday, InSight deployed its “mole,” or heat flow probe, on the Martian surface, and in the coming weeks, it will be the first probe to go more than 16 feet below the surface. This will determine Mars’ subsurface temperature and thermal conductivity.

InSight also shared a fond farewell to Opportunity on Twitter.

On Wednesday, Opportunity’s team bid her farewell while looking to the foundations the mission laid.

“When I think of Opportunity, I will recall that place on Mars where our intrepid rover far exceeded everyone’s expectations,” Callas said. “But what I suppose I’ll cherish most is the impact Opportunity had on us here on Earth. It’s the accomplished exploration and phenomenal discoveries. It’s the generation of young scientists and engineers who became space explorers with this mission. It’s the public that followed along with our every step. And it’s the technical legacy of the Mars Exploration Rovers, which is carried aboard Curiosity and the upcoming Mars 2020 mission.

And one day, NASA hopes rover tracks will be alongside human footprints on the Red Planet.

“It is because of trailblazing missions such as Opportunity that there will come a day when our brave astronauts walk on the surface of Mars,” NASA Administrator Jim Bridenstine said. “And when that day arrives, some portion of that first footprint will be owned by the men and women of Opportunity and a little rover that defied the odds and did so much in the name of exploration.” </s> The dust has settled on Mars, at least to the point that NASA has finally spotted the rover Opportunity again.

An image taken by NASA’s Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter showed the rover that stopped communicating with NASA on June 10.

A massive global dust storm on Mars caused the solar-powered rover to shut down, and the storm only started to dissipate in late July.

The rover shut down on the slopes of a hill in the Perseverance Valley of the Red Planet, and while it’s now visible, it has yet to reconnect with NASA. The image taken by the Orbiter’s HiRISE camera is from about 166 miles above the surface. The box in the image is a 154-foot-wide are with the blip in the middle being the rover.

Opportunity and fellow Rover Spirit arrived to Mars in 2004. Both Spirit and Opportunity’s missions originally only called for 90 Martian days, but both kept soldiering on. Spirit got bogged down in 2009, but Opportunity had been exploring more than 5,000 Martian days and traveling more than 28 miles before it shut down.

The Jet Propulsion Laboratory team that runs the rover program listens daily and sends a command several times a week to the rover in case it wakes back up.

Meanwhile, NASA’s Mars Curiosity rover was not affected as it is nuclear-powered, although the decrease in light had made photography more difficult and the rover is in the habit of protecting its camera after each use by pointing it toward the ground. So for now, Curiosity is the lone rover, with Opportunity on pause, Spirit having last communicated with NASA in 2010 and original rover Sojourner, which was part of the Mars Pathfinder mission in 1997.

A fifth rover, part of the the Mars 2020 mission, is slated to launch from Cape Canaveral Air Force Station in July or August of 2020 to take advantage of Mars and Earth’s relative proximity for arrival in February 2021. Also, the European Space Agency is planning the ExoMars mission to land in 2021 with its own rover. </s> Opportunity, the Mars Exploration Rover (MER), has been spotted in a satellite image. The photo was taken by NASA's HiRISE camera on-board the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO), which is used to monitor the planet and communicate with the rover.

The white box shows a 47 metre-wide area of Mars and Opportunity is in the middle of it.

The rover was recently caught up in a massive dust storm on the red planet. Several of these occurred at the same time blocking out the sun and thus depriving Opportunity of the solar power it needs to operate.

The rover was exploring Mars' Perseverance Valley when the storm started. It's been a little over 100 days since Opportunity last spoke to mission command.

Such events are planned for and NASA was aware of the approaching storm as the solar panels were generating less and less power as it grew in intensity. Opportunity was put into low power mode to conserve energy.

In this mode the rover wakes for its morning update from mission command and then takes a nap. In the afternoon it uses its onboard camera to check the atmosphere and sends an update to the MRO, it then goes back to sleep.

The rover then wakes on the next day - a Martian day, or sol, is 24 hours and 39 minutes - for further updates.

NASA put Opportunity into this low power mode on June 7. However the storm's intensity increased and that caused Opportunity experience a low power fault and the rover has been silent since.

Because it hasn't heard from Earth in some time the rover will now be in a mode called "uploss". This means it will try to communicate with home in a variety of different ways. NASA uses the deep space network to listen for signs it's operating.

NASA is also sending signals that will make the rover beep if it does happen to wake up. Initially it was doing this three times per week, it has since started transmitting signals multiple times per day.

All of the safety procedures are designed to protect the rover and prevent the onboard batteries from discharging too much. If Opportunity gets too cold then it could permanently disable it and end the mission.

This is because the on-board batteries that are charged by the solar panels need to be kept warm or they may stop functioning properly, which could stop the rover operating correctly.

However NASA is confident that Opportunity has a chance of surviving this storm. For one thing the rover's batteries are in generally good health, perhaps surprising for a nearly 15-year-old machine.

Additionally, NASA says that dust storms warm the planet, which should mean the rover isn't getting too cold.

Although the rover is now in quite a deep sleep and it may not know what time it is (crucial for scheduling wakeups) the backup systems will be waiting for the solar panels to generate enough power to ping earth.

If the rover does signal earth it's likely to take many weeks to troubleshoot it and restart all its systems.

NASA will continue to send signals to Opportunity until January 2019. If it hasn't heard back from the rover by then it's unlikely it will again. </s> The Opportunity rover is still taking an extended nap on Mars, but NASA has caught sight of the little robot. With the aid of the HiRISE camera aboard the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO), NASA has pinpointed Opportunity’s location on the slopes of Perseverance Valley. Knowing where the rover ended up is a nice development, but it doesn’t get us much closer to reviving Opportunity.

NASA’s Opportunity is ancient by the standards of a Mars rover. It touched down on Mars in 2004, and has traveled more than 28 miles thus far. Opportunity operated continuously until June 2018. That’s when the plucky little rover was overtaken by a massive Martian dust storm. The image from MRO above (click for large version) was captured from 166 miles above the planet’s surface. The white box marks an area 154 feet across (47 meters). Opportunity is the small dot right in the center.

Mars occasionally experiences global dust storms, and the one over this past summer was particularly severe. According to NASA, the tau (a measure of how much light is blocked) reached more than 10. Without dust storms, the tau of Mars’ atmosphere hovers around 1. NASA captured the MRO image of Opportunity on September 20th when the Tau was again just 1.3.

The new image shows Opportunity where it stopped when NASA put it in hibernation mode several months ago. Since Opportunity is solar powered, NASA knew it would be unable to operate during the dust storm. The team hoped it would retain enough power to keep its heaters and communication system running, but that looks increasingly unlikely now.

According to NASA, the terrain around Opportunity looks redder than usual for that region. That could indicate dust from the storm has fallen in a thick layer across the Perseverance Valley. If a layer of dust has covered Opportunity’s solar panels, it may never wake up. It’s been several months of no contact from the rover, indicating it never managed to power back up after the storm settled. Without power for its heaters, the batteries may have become inoperable. So, it might not even matter if the solar panels are clear at this point.

Earlier this month, NASA set a 45-day deadline for Opportunity to wake up. If the rover does not miraculously awaken and ping Earth by then, NASA will consider the mission over. Not everyone is happy with that decision, but Opportunity’s chances are admittedly low.

Now read: The Martian Dust Storm Is Clearing, but Opportunity Remains Silent, NASA Celebrates 5 Years of Curiosity With New Mars Rover Video, and Strange ‘cauliflower’ rocks on Mars may hide clues to ancient life </s> It’s been more than 100 days since a dust storm on Mars caused NASA's Opportunity rover to go dark, but there is new hope after a spacecraft orbiting the red planet spotted the small robot on the surface.

As the global dust storm blocked out sunlight, which is the source of Opportunity's power, the rover went into hibernation on June 11, the last time its team heard from the 14-year-old bot.

Opportunity's team on Earth at NASA have been trying without luck to contact the rover since the dust started to clear earlier this month. Right now, only about 25 percent of the sun's light is reaching the Martian surface, according to NASA.

The mission team has been listening for the rover using NASA's Deep Space Network Radio Science Receiver sending "sweep and beeps."

But there is hope, after HiRISE, a camera on board NASA's Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter, spotted the small robot on the surface. The photo showed Opportunity, or Oppy as it's affectionately called, at the center of an area about 154 feet wide.

What Oppy's supporters were hoping to see is whether the robot's solar panels, or arrays, are clear of Martian dust, enabling them to power the rover again.

"The HiRISE image shows some reddening of the surrounding area, suggesting dust fallout, but it is not possible to determine how much dust is on the arrays themselves," Andrew Good, with NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, wrote.

With this new image, the first of the rover since the storm, NASA will continue to wait for the dust to clear, continue to send commands to Oppy and wait for more imaging from HiRISE.

Recently, the Opportunity team said it would be increasing the frequency of commands it beams to the rover from multiple times a week to multiple times per day. NASA approved the plan to continue listening for Opportunity until January.

There is concern in the planetary science community the mission will end if Opportunity's team doesn't hear from the rover by the start of the New Year. Supporters have been using #WakeUpOppy on social media to encourage NASA to continue funding the robotic mission.

Opportunity has covered more than 28 miles on Mars during its 14 years on the red planet.
The mission of NASA's Opportunity rover on Mars comes to an end. The rover stopped communicating in June 2018 after a Martian dust storm, and attempts to reestablish communications have not been successful.