The Mars Opportunity rover is caught in a dust storm, and the craft is hunkered down doing its best to survive the intensifying weather. The storm was first detected on Friday June 1st by the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter, at which point the rover's team was notified because of the weather event's proximity to Opportunity. The rover uses solar panels, so a dust storm could have an extremely negative impact on Opportunity's power levels and its batteries.
By Wednesday June 6th, Opportunity was in minimal operations mode because of sharply decreasing power levels. The brave little rover is continuing to weather the storm; it sent a transmission back to Earth Sunday morning, which is a good sign. It means there's still enough charge left in the batteries to communicate with home, despite the fact that the storm is continuing to worsen.
[...] The main concern here isn't the dust storm itself. It's the need to keep the rover's heaters operational while maintaining a minimal power level in the batteries. This isn't the first storm that Opportunity has weathered, but it is the worst. According to NASA, the weather event the rover faced in 2007 had an opacity level around 5.5. The estimate for this current storm is somewhere around 10.8.
Opportunity is a hardy little rover, though, and it has continually defied our expectations over the last 15 years. The rover was only designed to last for a 90-day mission, and yet it's still going. Here's hoping that Oppy will continue its trek across the Martian surface for many, many days to come.
(Score: 3, Funny) by Entropy on Wednesday June 13 2018, @02:40AM (2 children)
Are clearly caused by global warming. We need to do our part such as switching to soy based foods to limit the beef industry methane production!
(Score: 1, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday June 13 2018, @05:30AM
Mars Trump has blue skin and green hair.
(Score: 2, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday June 13 2018, @08:06AM
You haven't been keeping up.
Climate change is caused by cars. Before: Zero cars on Mars. Now: Three cars on mars. That's an increase of more than several orders of magnitude.