It seems NASA's Opportunity Rover isn't just content with exceeding its originally designated lifespan by over a decade, it has not set another new record that the space agency's other rovers will have a tough time beating. Opportunity has now become the only man made object to ever complete a marathon, a distance of just over 26 miles, on the surface of another celestial body.
The Opportunity first landed on the surface of Mars in January 2004. Since that time, it has been busy exploring the surface of the Red Planet. The Opportunity definitely won't win any speed records, however, as it took 11 years and 2 months (or 3,968 Martian days) to complete the distance. This latest record comes less than a year after Opportunity broke the record held by the Soviet Union's Lunokhod 2 rover on the moon in 1973.
"This mission isn't about setting distance records, of course; it's about making scientific discoveries on Mars and inspiring future explorers to achieve even more," Opportunity's principal investigator at Cornell University in Ithaca, New York, Steve Squyres says. "Still, running a marathon on Mars feels pretty cool."
During its travels over the last decade, the Opportunity has been hard at work searching for evidence of life and discovered that the Red Planet might have actually been a much more hospitable place at one point in time and may have even harbored microbial life.
However, after a decade of transversing the Martian surface the Opportunity has begun to show its age. In December of last year, NASA reported that the rover was suffering from bouts of amnesia and that its flash memory was beginning to have problems. After avoiding using the memory for three months, NASA successfully reformatted the memory banks early this week allowing the rover to collect more data each day and carry out more complex experiments and observations.
"Opportunity can work productively without use of flash memory, as we have shown for the past three months, but with flash we have more flexibility for operations ... the flash memory allows data from intensive science activities to be returned over several days," Opportunity project manager at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California, John Callas says.
Unfortunately, Opportunity's days are numbered despite its record breaking successes. In the space agency's 2016 budget, funding for the rover has been pulled in favor of new missions to Mars and for a probe of Jupiter's moon Europa.
