In June of 2018, a planet-wide dust storm descended on Mars. With it, the fifteen-year mission of the Mars rover Opportunity came to a close.
Opportunity – nicknamed “Oppy” by her creators – was launched into orbit in July of 2003 on a mission meant to discover new information about the surface of the planet Mars. Though the trip was intended to last just over 92 Earth days, Oppy would spend the next fifteen years achieving new feats for exploratory rovers: traveling the longest off-planet surface distance of any rover, discovering signs of water in Mars’s soils, finding the first Martian meteorite, and even having an asteroid named after her.
Unfortunately, the June 2018 storm caused Oppy to enter hibernation shortly thereafter, leading the rover program to conclude that she had either been severely damaged or covered in dust due to the storm. According to NASA’s Mars Exploration Rovers website, Opportunity’s last response fell on June 10.
The Mars Exploration team at NASA has since made numerous attempts to contact the rover through a multitude of media, including both signal transmissions and music. The team created a playlist of songs entitled “Opportunity, Wake Up!” that they sent to Oppy, with selections ranging from Queen’s “Bohemian Rhapsody” to the Beatles’ “Here Comes the Sun.” You can find the playlist on Spotify here.
Opportunity’s mission and legacy have gone viral, making Oppy a hot topic both online and on campus. Journalist Jacob Margolis’s Twitter thread on the subject, in which he humanized Oppy’s last message to “my battery is low and it’s getting dark,” has received over 21,000 retweets within the last week alone.
A press conference was held at NASA’s Pasadena, CA Jet Propulsion Lab to announce the close of the mission to the public on February 13, 2019, but not before Mars Exploration Rover Mission’s principal investigator Dr. Steve Squyres sent one final message to Oppy as a goodbye: a recording of Billie Holiday’s 1944 song “I’ll Be Seeing You.” In the final chorus of the song, NASA and the world sent its last farewell to the little rover who beat the odds:
“I’ll find you in the morning sun
And when the night is new
I’ll be looking at the moon
But I’ll be seeing you”