NASA's Opportunity rover, a famously hardy and reliable rover that has well surpassed its intended duty life and continued to serve renewed science missions for over 15 years past retirement, is probably dead.
Opportunity was recently put to sleep-in hibernation to try and ride out one of the largest storms recorded on Mars. A sandstorm that covered the entire planet had the rover stuck smack in the middle of it. Opportunity is a solar powered machine, so it needs constant sunlight to keep it active. The dust storm was perhaps so intense that it might have covered the sky, blotting out the Sun.
Now, over the last few weeks, the storm has subsided, but the rover is reportedly not responding to NASA control centres. The idea was to keep a few low power systems active so that the battery does not freeze up in the cold. Low power mode is reportedly designed to remain quiet when the power is low, only waking up occasionally to check on its batteries to gauge just how much charge it has left.
The rover needs to have a certain amount of battery power to wake up fully out of its slumber, so if the random checks show that there is less power than needed, it simply returns to its low power mode, said NASA.
Speaking to Space.com, Michael Staab of NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory said that the team's morale has been a bit shaky. "This is the first time she has stopped talking to us and not resumed communication when we expected."
The report mentions now that the dust has settled to a considerable extent, the rover should have woken up. In fact, NASA says that the dust started to settle a few weeks back, so Opportunity's batteries should have started to get recharged again.
So that means the rover should have, over the last few weeks charged up to a point where the rover can come back to life, it not getting there yet seems to be a matter of concern for the ground crew at NASA.
