'Opportunity' Celebrates 10 Year Anniversary Roving Mars 51
An anonymous reader writes "Ten years ago today, six and half months after launch, the NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory's six-wheeled, solar-powered Opportunity rover landed on the surface of Mars, tumbling into a previously unknown feature now referred to as the 'Eagle Crater'. Opportunity and its twin Rover Spirit, which had arrived three weeks earlier, proceeded to crawl over and through plains, craters, and sand dunes, collecting and analyzing soil and rock samples, and taking panoramic photos of their surroundings, blowing orders of magnitude past the original projected 90 day mission timeframe. Spirit's mission drew to a close after it became irretrievably bogged down in soft soil in 2009; scientists lost contact with the rover in early 2010. Meanwhile, Opportunity is still going strong, with scientists announcing new evidence this past week of an ancient mild watery environment conducive to microbial life. Several web sites have mined the NASA archives to assemble tributes commemorating 10 years of work from Opportunity: Time, space.com, Information Week/Techweb. There's also a bricks-and-mortar tribute; the Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum in Washington, DC has just opened an exhibit featuring photos sent by the two rovers."
When will it get to the Face on Mars? (Score:1, Funny)
Does anybody know when it will get to the Face on Mars? This is something truly worth investigating from the ground. They could provide real evidence to show one way or another that it is or is not it is intelligently-made.
Not Orders Of Magnitude (Score:4, Funny)
"...blowing orders of magnitude past the original projected 90 day mission timeframe."
Minimum of 2 orders of magnitude. 90 * 100 = 9000, or around 24 to 25 years.