Opportunity Mars Rover Marks 12 Years on Red Planet
Source: Space.com
Opportunity Mars Rover Marks 12 Years on Red Planet
By Elizabeth Howell, Space.com Contributor | January 26, 2016 01:30pm ET
NASA's Opportunity Mars rover just keeps rolling along, a dozen years after touching down on the Red Planet.
Opportunity landed on Mars 12 years ago Sunday (Jan. 24), a few weeks after its twin, Spirit, hit the red dirt. (Opportunity's landing occurred on Jan. 25, 2004, in the GMT time zone, but it was still Jan. 24 in the PST time zone, where the rover's home base, NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in California, is located.) The two robots were tasked with finding signs of past water activity on Mars, and both of them quickly turned up plenty of evidence near their disparate landing sites.
Spirit and Opportunity were originally supposed to explore for just 90 days, but both rovers far outlasted their warranties. Spirit stopped communicating with Earth in 2010 and was declared dead a year later, and Opportunity is still going strong today.
While Opportunity has suffered some memory problems in the past year, its solar panels are working well, rover team members said. The robot has been able to keep working through the minimum-power months of the southern Martian winter instead of staying still to conserve energy. (The southern winter solstice occurred Jan. 2.)
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Read more: http://www.space.com/31735-opportunity-rover-12-years-mars.html
Source: Discovery News
Powered Up, Veteran Rover Soldiers Through Mars Winter
JAN 26, 2016 09:08 PM ET // BY IAN O'NEILL
For a rover with a prime mission of only 3 months, NASA’s Mars rover Opportunity sure is going above and beyond the call of duty.
On Monday, the veteran wheeled rover celebrated its 12th year (yes, that’s 12 Earth years, or 144 months) on the red planet and, although it’s been a hard road for the robot, it is still doing science. And it’s doing science during the most aggressive period of the Martian year, which is nearly 687 Earth days long.
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Read more: http://news.discovery.com/space/powered-up-veteran-rover-soldiers-through-mars-winter-160126.htm
= new reply since forum marked as read
Who says we can't build stuff anymore??? 
