(upbeat music)
On February 1st, 2019,
members of the Mars Exploration team
gathered at NASA's JPL headquarters
to say their final goodbye
to one of space explorations greatest pioneers,
the Opportunity Rover.
I wanted to say,
with the completion of tonight's commanding,
this concludes operations for MER-1 spacecraft ID 253.
And on behalf of the entire MER project,
we'd like to thank the DSN for over 15 and a half years
of outstanding support, from launch until tonight.
And this is station 14,
on behalf of the network,
thank you for your comments,
and it's a sad day for all of us.
(upbeat music)
14, you are released.
And 14 copies.
MER Project, off the net.
(all applaud)
In an instant,
the lights went out on a record journey of almost 15 years.
A far cry from the expected 90 days survival rate.
In it's wake,
Opportunity has left a history-redefining legacy.
We have been given the opportunity,
by a team of engineers 15 years ago,
who built two of the most extraordinary pieces
of space exploration hardware ever conceived and built.
You only get to do something like this
for the first time once.
Well sort of,
after all, the program did construct twin Rovers,
destined to land in two locations
on opposite sides of the planet.
A redundancy designed to increase their chance of success.
Spirit was the first to break away from Earth's gravity,
with Opportunity lighting up the Florida night sky
a few weeks later,
as it too rocketed towards
our closest planetary neighbor, Mars.
It wasn't an easy trip.
Solar storms a few months into the journey
bombarded the Rovers with brutal radiation.
NASA's $850 million explorers
weren't communicating with home.
It was a nail biting moment,
until Mission Control tried the old IT help desk stand-by,
turning your Rover off and back on again.
It worked,
first crisis averted.
Now, to the really harrowing part of the mission,
landing on Mars.
Hurtling at 16,000 miles per hour,
about 10 times the speed of a bullet.
The heat shield in front of the Rover vehicle
got about as hot as the surface of the Sun.
A supersonic parachute deployed.
Atmospheric entry.
It was time for everyone back on Earth
to strap themselves in.
It was going to be a bumpy ride.
Current altitude 8000 feet.
The heat shield jettisoned.
The airbags blew up in less than 1,000th of a second.
And then she bounced.
We're getting a bouncing signal.
(crowd cheers)
We are getting a bounce signal.
Confirmation that space craft is bouncing and alive on Mars.
And bounced,
26 times.
We have a momentary loss of signal,
as the space craft is bouncing on the surface.
It is difficult to maintain lock.
We need to reacquire the signal,
to have positive confirmation of a safe landing.
But there's always a possibility something goes wrong,
something you didn't account for,
or just bad luck,
like really sharp pointy rocks
right where you want it to land
that might puncture the airbags.
But these are the risks that you take
when you're going someplace where you've never been,
that you know is dangerous and unknown.
We're seeing it on the LCP.
(Crowd cheers and Applauds)
We have a very strong signal.
(indistinct radio chatter)
(cheering and applause)
Finally the airbags deflated,
and the solar arrays opened up,
charging the power hungry little Rover.
And she lifted her head,
the panoramic camera,
and sent her first beautiful, "We are here.", postcard.
When Opportunity sent back that first picture
from Eagle Crater,
that night is burned in my brain,
I will never forget it.
It was such a dramatic image of Mars.
And it was so different
than any images we've seen before.
It was now time
for Opportunity to get to work.
It's mission,
the quest for the holy grail of planetary exploration,
liquid water.
It was initially planned as a 90 day expedition
that would stretch on for 15 years.
The Mars Exploration Program had this long standing goal
of searching for signs of life on Mars.
But that's a really big question.
That's a really hard question to answer.
So we started with something a little more simple.
A little more fundamental.
Was there ever water, liquid water on Mars?
Where and for how long?
And that was what Spirit an Opportunity
really went out to go look for.
Golf cart sized Spirit and Opportunity
were designed to be wandering geologists.
Instead of pics and hammers, though,
they have little particle blasters
that they use to take samples,
and spectrometers and microscopes to examine them.
And wouldn't you know it,
fortune was immediately on Opportunity's side.
Opportunity landed on a flat plane
known as Meridiani Planum,
before gently bouncing
to the inside of a small meteorite impact crater.
Opportunity lands right from the get go
discovery of water formed rocks right, it came easy.
Here she found little,
so called, blueberries,
that contained hematite and iron ore.
Opportunity found evidence of water
just immediately below the surface,
in the shapes of the rocks
there is cross-bedding in the rocks
and then also in the minerals.
This mineral hematite,
it's an iron mineral
that forms in areas with a lot of water.
The next 56 Martian days, known as sols,
were spent probing and analyzing the area.
It looked as though Opportunity's landing site
was once the shoreline of a salty sea,
but one that was too salty and acidic
for life as we know it.
It was now time to leave the safe confines of Eagle Crater,
and strike out into the vast Martian terrain.
Opportunity reached it's next destination,
Endurance Crater,
after a one month long, one kilometer trek.
Peering across the rim of the 130 meter wide crater,
it spent the next month detailing the 20 foot precipice.
And then, in what could have been
a mission ending decision, gently descended.
The next six months were spent analyzing the crater,
where Opportunity would once again
find evidence of ancient water.
But it was too salty to harbor life.
On it's 315th day on Mars,
the Rover exited the crater
on it's way towards it's discarded heat shield.
Allowing scientists and engineers back home
to examine the effects of the Rover's entry
through the Martian atmosphere,
as well as the nine foot wide impact crater.
It taught us how to do surface operations.
It taught us how to read the terrain and navigate
and plot a safe path from one point to another.
We did not know how to do those,
it was all speculative.
Lo and behold, a few days later,
Opportunity notched another first in space exploration,
as it saw the first meteorite on another planet.
Having spent close to a year on Mars,
it was now time to head south,
towards Victoria Crater.
But not everything went according to plan.
On sol 446, Opportunity ended up getting it's wheels stuck,
rendering it immobile.
The culprit, an exceptionally tricky sand dune,
measuring a whopping 12 inches tall.
Team members back home would perform
weeks worth of simulations,
in hopes of finding the right way
to escape the sandy clutches
of what would come to be known as Purgatory Dune.
Over a month later,
it would finally free itself,
and continue on it's long voyage.
What we found is, the best way to get it out,
is just to put it in reverse, and gun it.
The Rover eventually popped out.
Finally,
21 months after leaving it's original landing site,
Opportunity arrived at the rim of Victoria Crater.
A colossal half mile wide, 230 feet deep, impact crater.
A geologist's dream,
but entering it was no walk in the park.
It was here that the team caught the first image
of the Rover from space,
sitting at the edge.
Opportunity spent six months
searching for a safe path in,
when, in late June, gathering Martian dust storms
threatened to kill off the hardy Rover.
Every couple of seasonal cycles on Mars,
they get these dust storms
and they can be global dust storms
where they literally obscure the sunlight.
They're solar powered,
it's all about getting enough energy from the sun.
Opportunity had to hunker down for two months
while dust storms raged,
limiting the solar power to a level
that nearly caused the permanent failure of both Rovers.
So they went radio silent.
Radio dark for days.
And we didn't know if the Rovers were dead or alive.
And we programmed the Rovers to wake up
at a certain time in the future.
And it was very dramatic
because all of us were there in the control room
waiting for the data to come down.
And we'd gone days without hearing from them.
And we'd seen orbital imagery of the planet
just clouded in dust.
Would they be alive?
Would they tell us?
And sure enough, right at the moment they woke up,
they said I'm here, and I'm okay.
Turns out, not all dust storms
are harmful to the Rovers,
they can also be a blessing.
Mars is riddled with dust devils,
dust devils that, instead of choking our roving ladies,
kept them going long past their sell by date.
Dust accumulates at the rate of about 1% a day.
Which means that after 100 days,
most of the solar arrays will be covered by dust.
That would mean we'd have
a 100 day mission, a 90 day mission
that's what we designed.
What we didn't expect is that wind gusts,
or wind events, or dust devils, or something,
would come along, and blow the dust off the arrays.
It's like someone came by with a leaf blower
and just dusted the whole Rover off
and it was factory new again.
The revived Rover eventually entered the crater
and spent a year investigating interior,
before setting off for the much larger Endeavour Crater,
a 13 mile, three year journey.
There were too many of these dangerous ripples in our way.
And we actually had to take this circuitous route that,
at times, took us away from the crater,
only to then cut back
and then approach it more directly.
During this trek
Opportunity would break the operational record
for a functioning probe on Mars,
a mark it still holds on it's own.
Since it's twin and mission mate, the Spirit Rover,
had it's last communication with Earth
on March 22nd of 2010,
when it's wheel became stuck in soft sand,
and could no longer adjust the tilt of it's solar panels.
Spirit eventually ran out of power,
and NASA officially ended it's mission in May of 2011,
two months before Opportunity's arrival at Endeavour Crater.
A very different place, geologically speaking,
from either Rovers' landing site.
It was here that the team first discovered veins of Gypsum,
a mineral deposited by liquid water and clay minerals,
which suggest intriguing ancient history,
which includes
a potentially life supporting water chemistry.
And because it's been able to drive that great distance,
it's actually gone back in time.
And what I mean by that is,
the geology is of different ages
at different places on Mars.
Where the Rover's landed on Mars
is sort of middle age Mars.
Where Opportunity has driven to is ancient Mars,
and it's where different clues reveal
the complex history of ancient Mars
and has informed us about the ancient history of the planet,
which is that it was very much Earth-like, at one time.
As Opportunity explored the ridge
of Endeavour Crater,
it passed yet another milestone in March of 2015.
Having traveled more than a marathon in distance
on the Martian surface.
The requirement was for one Rover
to traverse at least 600 meters.
That's half a mile,
and Opportunity has gone over a marathon's distance.
So more than 26 miles,
more than 42 kilometers on the surface of Mars,
more than any other human enterprise beyond the Earth.
You could say
the Rover set the off-Earth driving distance record.
By the end, Opportunity traversed
more than 28 miles of Martian landscape.
Sharing more than 225 thousand images of it's surroundings
with researchers back on Earth.
Perseverance Valley, believed to be a water formed gully,
was Opportunity's final destination.
It was here, on June 10th 2018,
Sol 5111,
that Opportunity sent it's last message,
creatively and poetically translated by media outlets as
"My battery is low, and it's getting dark."
This, as a massive
and devastatingly dense dust storm approached.
And so the Rover couldn't generate any energy with that.
And so we saw the Rover just shut down.
And there was nothing we could do at that point
because it didn't have power to keep going.
And we just had to wait.
And that's what we did do
is wait and wait and wait.
This is it's last panoramic view.
Eight months later,
NASA would designate Opportunity lost.
It's mission complete.
This mission accomplished so much more than we wanted to.
It's just, it's mind boggling to me.
If you had told me around the time we landed,
that Spirit and Opportunity,
were going to each accomplish one quarter,
or one 10th of what they ultimately did,
I would have been thrilled.
But while the operation may be over,
it's ultimate enterprise continues.
New programs, like the Curiosity Rover,
which landed on Mars in 2012,
and the future Mars 2020 Rover,
are designed to build on the contributions
of both Spirit and Opportunity.
Not only their string of scientific firsts,
but also their emotional journey,
illuminating the history
and beauty of the Red Planet.
It's just almost incomprehensibly remarkable,
and how much we have rewritten the Martian history books.
We have to remember not the loss,
but the gain that we've had over the many years
and how, what a phenomenal story
because it was meant to be a three month odyssey
and it's been an incredible discovery
and that's the great gift.
That's the wonderful thing to remember.
(music)