This week, the Mars rover Opportunity celebrated its 12th anniversary on the red planet, having first landed there on Jan. 24, 2004. The rover is still functioning, and has an exploratory mission over the winter in “Marathon Valley” in the Endeavour crater.
When Opportunity first landed, the NASA team thought the harsh Martian environment would render it useless in a matter of months. But the golf cart-sized rover, powered by solar energy, is still collecting data today.
“Twelve years is a very long time to have this sort of a continuous presence,” Matt Golombek, Mars Exploration Rovers (MER) project scientist, told the San Gabriel Valley Tribune. “For a science team to be this involved, on a daily basis, for this long on Mars, is pretty much unprecedented.”
And the rover has started to show its age. In March of last year, NASA reformatted the Opportunity’s flash memory after it experienced dozens of amnesia events and other memory-related malfunctions. But for the most part, the NASA team still sees the potential for more missions with the rover.
