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Submitted via IRC for cmn32480
NASA's Opportunity rover has had an incredible career already, spending years upon years studying the Martian surface and proving to be an incredibly reliable and hardy piece of hardware. Unfortunately, a NASA dust storm that began kicking up in May may have abruptly ended its historic run.
In mid-June, the solar-powered Opportunity ran out of juice and was forced to go into its dormant standby mode. The dust storm which swallowed the entirety of Mars had blocked out the Sun, cutting the rover off of its only available source of power. NASA engineers had remained optimistic that the rover would wake back up when the skies began to clear, but things aren't looking good thus far.
[...] That's...not great news. NASA knew that the rover would be forced to sit dormant for a while because of the intensity of the storm, but that was several weeks ago. The dust has since began to settle, and enough light should be pushing its way down to the surface to begin recharging Opportunity's batteries once again.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday August 15 2018, @10:07PM
"repair rovers tool kit" - aka an astronaut. That'll be a bit more costly. (You can't conceivably prepare a robot to do any conceivable repair without running into scaling expenses that wouldn't make it worthwhile. You could make a robot that can handle certain "popular" repairs.)
But seriously, a rover back online wouldn't be new. It would be worn out and running like an old car that was patched up enough to work. Unless you bring spares enough to build an entirely new rover, and then why didn't you just launch a new rover? That, coupled with most rovers now seem to be exceeding their primary mission lives, make this a hard one to swallow. But cool to think about.