Click here to plan your visit and purchase tickets or you can buy tickets at the main Aviation Museum entrance. Your Name:. Your Email Address:. Comment: characters remaining. Evergreen Museum. Got something to say? We want to hear from you! Leave a Comment. Follow Us. Fraeman was in high school when Opportunity landed and was able to be at the JPL that night as part of an outreach event. Heather Justice, the rover's senior driver, also saw Opportunity as a touchstone. When she was in high school in Maryland, she saw a documentary about the rovers.
As Spirit stopped but the Opportunity mission went on, its human minders grew close. The children of mission scientists would hear of Opportunity almost as if the rover were a distant cousin. Pairs of rover drivers would spend so much time together, they'd practically read each other's minds.
A lot of life happens. Now, the team has six months to wrap up and archive the mission's data and otherwise wind down what for some has been a fixture of their lives for decades. This global mosaic of Mars is centered on Valles Marineris, the solar system's largest canyon range.
It extends 4, kilometers and is seven kilometers deep in some places. While this may be the end for Opportunity, the study and exploration of Mars is far from over.
The rover Curiosity is still chugging along, as are several Mars orbiters and the InSight lander. The European and Russian space agencies are readying their own Mars rover, recently named Rosalind Franklin after the pioneering x-ray crystallographer. And many alumni from Spirit and Opportunity are hard at work on the upcoming Mars rover , which will search for signs of past life and cache rock samples for future return to Earth. In the meantime, Opportunity will stand as a monument to science for hundreds of thousands of years—and maybe even a site where future explorers pay tribute.
Perhaps in coming decades, humans will touch down in Meridiani Planum, Opportunity's landing area. Some scientists and engineers, including Seibert, have formally suggested the region as a landing site for crewed Mars missions. All rights reserved. Share Tweet Email. Read This Next Wild parakeets have taken a liking to London. Animals Wild Cities Wild parakeets have taken a liking to London Love them or hate them, there's no denying their growing numbers have added an explosion of color to the city's streets.
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Animals Whales eat three times more than previously thought. Weitz was pulled aside again by Channel 9 to give a post launch interview, which was periodically interrupted by yelling and screaming from the rest of the scientists. The TV cameras were taken off the tripods and turned onto the celebrants. Weitz returned from her interview, saying "they asked me how I feel about the successful launch. What do they expect me to say?
With the spacecraft on its way and the reporters quickly dissipating to file their stories, the scientists organized themselves and headed to a Tiki bar on the shore to celebrate. Weitz kept receiving phone calls from the operations center with good news: perfect third stage ignition, and later payload separation, a so far flawless mission. In the midst of conversation Golombek would drum his hands on the table, endangering people's beers, repeating "We're going to Mars!
Finally, at , Weitz got the call we'd all been waiting for: "We got signal from the spacecraft," she told us. Bell was smiling, finally able to relax. By that time, though, the thrill of the successful launch was wearing off for the scientists who'd done this before, particularly Christensen and Golombek. Mountains of calibration data await; these data must be carefully analyzed so that scientists will be able to understand what they see on the surface of Mars. Software for the rover is behind schedule and must be developed, tested, and tweaked.
There will be many weeklong "Operational Readiness Tests," or ORTs, in which the scientists, engineers, and mission operators participate in elaborate simulations of mission operations so that they can fine-tune the details of how a team of hundreds of people will be able to make the most of one rover on a distant planet.
And Mars Global Surveyor and Odyssey are still returning gigabytes of data in the form of images of the landing sites, which must be analyzed so that the scientists can be ready to test hypotheses with the rovers once they land. All of the scientists present were a little jealous of the launch team, whose work had just ended with the successful firing of the third stage of the rocket.
Now the mission team's work really begins, and once the spacecraft lands, the schedule will be grueling. The spacecraft will be operated on Mars time, which is not in synch with Pasadena time, and every day of the spacecraft's life the scientists will have just three hours to evaluate an entire day's worth of data, then meet and develop a consensus about what to do next. Consensus building among typically strong-willed scientists and safety-minded engineers is not easy under normal circumstances; sleep deprivation and the demanding schedule increase the challenge to a level that quelled Christensen and Golombek's elation for the moment.
And when the revolt happens you can't bring in a new team of rover drivers, they're the only rover drivers there are. Christensen certainly wouldn't give up space exploration. I asked the two researchers whether they would go to Mars.
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