After some 15 prolific years on the martian surface, NASA’s Opportunity rover has gone silent. It took a whopping planet-wide dust storm to fell the solar-powered robot, but, in February, the space agency officially ended the mission. We talked with NASA scientists about their experiences working on the golf-cart-sized rover and what Opportunity meant to them. Their eulogies for the lost rover, originally intended to last just three months on Mars, are below.
Former Mars rover driver team lead
“Put simply, I loved Opportunity, as I did her twin sister, Spirit. I was privileged to be part of a team that was ecstatically devoted to them for years. We sacrificed dinners with family, vacations, whole marriages to those rovers. And they were worth it: In exchange, they gave us a planet. They were our eyes and ears, our remote robot bodies.
“The thought of saying goodbye to Opportunity fills me ...
