The Lifetime of an Opportunity

-Henry Ford

Back in 2003, a twin pair of rovers -- Spirit and Opportunity -- were launched from Earth to Mars. For no good reason at all, Opportunity has long been my favorite of the two.



Over that time, it's made some amazing discoveries, including the following:

Discovering -- up close -- what look like dried-up tracks from flowing water at Burns Cliff.

Discovering "martian blueberries," or hematite spheres about half the size of your little finger's nail. These are particularly interesting, because these litter nearly the entire path of Opportunity along the Meridiani Planum, and are formed on Earth in hot springs and pools of standing water.

Discovering "heat shield rock," the first meteorite ever found on another planet!


The rover spent nearly two years exploring the crater's rim and interior, creating a topographic map of the interior and studying the layering along the crater walls.



Below, compare Endeavor to Victoria -- just above center -- to get a sense of scale.

By this time, though, Opportunity's time on Mars had taken its toll. Its solar panels -- the source of its power -- had been obscured my martian dust. In fact, by April of 2009, Opportunity was only receiving 50% of the power it had been receiving in January of 2004, thanks to the huge amount of (easily visible) dust clogging its panels.




It's there now. Just a few days ago, Opportunity -- the one surviving twin -- arrived at the rim of Endeavor crater.



The astute among you who click on this final image to get the hi-res version will notice a graininess on the ground. Those are still martian blueberries, or hematite spheres, suggesting this entire journey that Opportunity's taken has been along ground that was once underwater!

And now that it's at the crater's rim, the next step is going to be to explore this 22-kilometer-wide behemoth. It arrived at the crater rim just yesterday, at the outcrops named "Spirit Point" after its deceased twin.

Inside the crater will be the oldest geological layers ever accessed on Mars by any scientific instrument. Opportunity has officially run for nearly 30 times its expected mission duration, and it's still going strong. I know everyone with a sense of curiosity is with me right now, thinking that you can't wait to see what Opportunity finds next!

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"You must live in the present, launch yourself on every wave, find your eternity in each moment. Fools stand on their island opportunities and look toward another land. There is no other land, there is no other life but this." -Henry David Thoreau Maybe for you, Henry. But a century and a half…
"In any field, find the strangest thing and then explore it." -John Archibald Wheeler Sometimes, things get difficult. Sometimes, there are challenges you have to face that you never even expected, much less were prepared for. And sometimes, it seems like there's no point in even holding on to hope…

You know those "Foundation for a Better Life" billboards? The "pass it on" ones?

Those rovers ought to be nominated for the first nonhuman examples, category "overachievement" or "quality."

By D. C. Sessions (not verified) on 10 Aug 2011 #permalink

I'm 58 years old. I still get excited. I feel like I did when I read the "Lucky Starr" books 50 years ago. When is the next blast-off from Florida?


I've always been a bit partial to Spirit, though. I've always been a sucker for the underdog. Or underrover, as it were.

Mars rovers are my favoritest robots :-)

I always smile a bit when it is related that they were "Originally slated for a 90-day mission". I've always assumed that was the shortest warranty JPL thought they could get away with when selling to the bureaucrats with the purse strings.

Amazing engineering.


Man, whenever I hear people complaining about no more shuttle flights, I never understand it. The Mars rovers are so much cheaper and so much more awesome. What we need from NASA isn't a bunch of low-earth-orbit space tourism, what we need is a crapload of more stuff like this. How thrilling it is that we can extend humanity's sight so much further than our little human eyes can take us.

By Anonymous Coward (not verified) on 10 Aug 2011 #permalink

Ok, what gives? I admit I haven't been paying close attention recently, but I have had an image of cliffs from "endurance" crater as my desktop background since 2004, and now these reports that Opportunity has just arrived at endurance crater:


Endevour, Cape Tribulation, Cape York.....Ahh, think it's time to book a holiday in the tropics again....Haven't been to Cape Trib. in 6 years, but regularly go to Cairns.



psmith: The rovers' designers did, from what I can recollect, play around with some designs for a solar panel cleaner. But they were running into problems coming up with designs that were mechanically simple and didn't add too much mass to the rovers. Eventually, they just decided to rely on the martian wind and hope for the best - a strategy that paid off, overall.



In space exploration you can't define the target, and getting there takes more resources than whatever is done there. So quality doesn't count that much. You go for robustness.

By Lassi HippelÃ¤inen (not verified) on 11 Aug 2011 #permalink

I still get as excited over this as back when Neil Armstrong mis-spoke his famous quote, back when I was eight. (I didn't know then that he meant to say, "that's one small step for a man".)

I have to wonder when a man will walk up to Opportunity, pat it on its camera, and tell it, "Well done, and thanks!" When I was eight, we were supposed to be on Mars by now.

By lordshipmayhem (not verified) on 11 Aug 2011 #permalink

D.C. Sessions,


The folks at JPL are also very good at getting the most out of a spacecraft. Consider the Voyager Interstellar Mission: the original Voyager 1 mission to Jupiter and Saturn ended in 1980, and Voyager 2's study of all four giant planets ran through 1989. JPL is getting data from Voyager at 160 bits/second, which doesn't sound like much nowadays, but they're still getting data.

It's impressive scenery and an impressive technological achievement. But don't you also find it a little depressing to see inhospitable wilderness stretching out to every horizon? And it's not just that the rover landed in a desert-like region. The whole planet is like that!

I love that they named some features after Alvin, Jason and Argo - some machines* we need more examples of on Earth and in space.

*Yes, yes, they may have been named after much older inspirations than submersibles, but that's what I think of when I hear those names.

I can't think of these two without envisioning Wall-E and getting a little misty-eyed.

An undeniably impressive technological feat! But, those "blueberries" that rolled out from their ancient sediment host may have formed as concretions in the presence of water but the hematite is certainly post=depositional, a result of the later dehydration of the original water-precipitated iron minerals, the hydrous ferric oxides. And, if the blueberry hematite is really the gray, coarse-grained, platy variety "seen" from space (and which heavily influenced the Rover site selection), it is more than just diagenetic, it is metamorphic. Strongly heated. Either way, the water in which they formed was long gone from these rocks that are billions of years old. Very small chance of finding life in billion-year old rocks, even on Earth. Our billion-year old Archean banded iron ores contain huge amounts of hematite, even coarse-grained platy hematite, but no water...and very few fossils.

Next visit to Mars, following the water, looking for life? This time follow your Henry Ford quote: "more intelligently" Look for other minerals such as aluminosilicate clays or the hydrous iron oxides,but not hematite. Clay minerals, at least, still have water in their structure. Hematite does not.


I wasn't around for the moon landing, that was well before I was born, but I think I would just cry my heart out to see someone, as mentioned, eventually reach Opportunity, and give it a good old "Well done,". It's well deserved.



I designed the oscillators. :) Nice to meetcha.

By The Other Doug (not verified) on 11 Aug 2011 #permalink

wonderful!! Innumerable Thanks for sharing.

By prakash m (not verified) on 11 Aug 2011 #permalink

FWIW, I am an engineer -- and when we shoot for a design life of 90 days, we're stacking a whole buncha sigmas to make sure that a failure at 90 days is pretty danged unlikely.

Take those sigmas the other direction, or even just stick around peak probability, and you're out quite a ways.

What that analysis does not account for is design defects. In any complex effort that can't be completely tested in advance, there are innumerable ways to shoot yourself in the foot. Many aim higher, e.g. the nads.


By D. C. Sessions (not verified) on 11 Aug 2011 #permalink

I'm not overly excited about the Rovers.
But let me add my 1 cent.
Opportunity and Spirit were worth every penny.

For what??
The technological spin-off? Yes!!

The Rovers do gritty science in every sense of the word. Travelling 20 miles in 7 years measuring temperature, pressure, wind, snapping pictures up at that landscape and down at these pebbles and around and around... well it's so boring...

But it's more than these little machines; its thousands of man and women's scientific and technical minds focused persistently upon these two microscopes placed upon our fellow planet, Mars. Yes Rovers are microscopes. My eyeballs and brain hurts just thinking of focusing upon such microscopic almost insanely same detail. Why? Why?


But no one seems to mention scientific spin-off. Yet, it seems to me that the greatest value to humanity of Opportunity and Spirit's millions of photographs and millions of pages of data is the scientific spin-off. What???


And guess what? Some of the meteorological models broke when scientists put Mars' temperatures, winds, solar radiation and other data into their models. So planetary weather models got a whole lot better; because of Opportunity and Endeavor.


So, I'm very glad Opportunity and Spirit didn't get buried in a Martian sandstorm. Because now our Earth weather models that predict global warming are better and more robust, maybe much better models; because of Opportunity and Spirit.

So that's just my 1 cent. Just a hypothesis.

Anyway, thank you very much Rover scientists and engineers and technicians. Don't mind my eyeballs, they are just hurting thinking about your work; which I really really appreciate. Next Mars Rover is planed to launch in November 2011. Nice.

Such hard hard work. Yes, I guess we do need to personalize these little Rovers as heroes. It's shorthand for looking thousands of people in the eye and saying, "Thank you, thank you. Job well done!"

Re: OKThen

The best model is the one that makes accurate predictions for your modeled responses over the range you're interested in. Trying to make a model cover a wide range of responses than is necessary will almost always result in a worse model, not a better one.


Remember the air bag balloons that they inflated around the rovers to "bounce" them to a safe landing. This involved the invention of a new form of textile that was a strong as steel.

The inventor of that fabric from those missions went on to create what I consider to be the most amazing technology coming out today - the XP car!


The government was going to help them develop it but then during the GFC slushed out all the cash instead to GM for the Chevy Volt! Because of the credit crunch they are having trouble financing. This is the kind of technology that made America a superpower. I'd encourage anyone looking to invest in something that is game changing to check out their website.

Rev Enki
Good point.

Sam Nelson
Very nice. I did not know.


The scary, scary, scary part is the landing sequence. An awful lot of things have to go exactly right, and it's a year of transit in harsh space to travel to Mars, plenty of time for all kinds of deterioation, or parts seizing up.

For example, the British Beagle 2 didn't make it. Gut wrenching stuff.
