NASA Extended The Deadline For Its Opportunity Mars Rover Until January 2019
NASA has set January 2019 as the deadline for rescuing the Opportunity Mars rover. The engineers of the US space agency have been trying to contact the robot since late summer, when a massive dust storm shut down Opportunity, but without success. However, NASA is still optimistic about reviving the Opportunity rover.
The Opportunity Mars rover got trapped by a massive dust storm on the Red Planet during the first weeks of June. As it is relying on solar power to recharge its battery, the Opportunity Mars probe decided to automatically go into the energy-saving mode to conserve its remaining charge until the storm would have passed. Once the storm was over, however, NASA found that a large amount of Martian dust had accumulated on the Opportunity’s solar panels, preventing the rover from recovering. Back then, the US space agency established a 45-day deadline that ended last week.
But NASA has confirmed that it will not give up on Opportunity Mars rover in the upcoming months and will continue to try recovering the module until January 2019. “NASA will continue with its current strategy to try to make contact with the Opportunity rover,” the US space agency said in a statement.
NASA set the deadline for its Opportunity Mars rover for January 2019
This week, the US space agency made another sad announcement, the deadline the Kepler Space Telescope which has presented some very concerning malfunctions, before running out of fuel. On the other hand, the Opportunity Mars rover arrived the neighboring planet with the intention of working for 90 days but ended up staying 15 years during which it studied the surface of the Red Planet revealing some very significant data.
On July 4th, 2017, NASA celebrated 20 years of exploration on Mars, as in 1997, the Pathfinder mission landed, leading to the first rover to set foot on Mars, Sojourner. Some of the robots that have worked there have already died, but exploration continues and other missions will continue to take off, as planned, for 2020. Hopefully, by then, Opportunity Mars rover will be active again to welcome its more modern “cousins.”
Vadim is a passionate writer on various topics but especially on stuff related to health, technology, and science. Therefore, for Great Lakes Ledger, Vadim will cover health and Sci&Tech news.
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