There has been a huge storm on Mars that has thrown up so much dust and darkened the skies so that NASA’s 14-year-old solar-powered Mars Exploration Rover (MER) named Opportunity has been silent since June 10. No sunlight, no charging the rover’s solar panels.
Opportunity went into low-power mode and has been asleep and waiting for enough sunlight to recharge.
We are coming up on three months and hopefully with the storm lifting, the dust will settle. NASA has been pinging Opportunity via the Deep Space Network several times a week waiting for the solar panels to do their job.
Opportunity was supposed to continue sending data for 90 days on Mars, but it has been operating for 14 years, so NASA's calculations were only off, thankfully, by about 60 times. (And this IS rocket science.)
But the blackout may have caused “faults” caused by lack of power. The rover had a low-power fault, and then a clock fault. If the clock has failed, poor Opportunity can’t tell how much time has passed, the date or when to expect check-ins from Earth or when to send out scheduled signals for engineers to receive.
But NASA says that if power returns the crafty rover it can use clues such as light levels to determine whether it’s day or night and regain some sense of time, and Opportunity will begin checking its communications equipment and scroll through a list of possible ways to re-establish communication with Earth.
The Mars Exploration Program team continues to update the mission’s official page on the team’s expectations and the conditions at the rover’s site.
NASA’s Mars Exploration Program has set up an online postcard generator. Of course, I have sent Opportunity an optimistic message.
SOURCES
www.astronomy.com/news/
Will the Opportunity Rover Wake Up Soon? - D-brief
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