The “Haunting” Last Message From NASA’s Opportunity Rover, Sent From Inside A Planet-Wide Storm

The current generation of Mars rovers began their adventures – finding strange rocks and potentially getting caught up in the center of electrified dust devils, among other important planetary research – in 2012 and 2021. But before that, there was Sojourner – the first rover to explore another planet in 1997 – and the Opportunity and Spirit rovers, which both touched down in January 2004.

Opportunity and Spirit landed on opposite sides of the planet, in areas that scientists suspected may have once held water in the ancient past. The rovers were tasked with searching for a variety of rocks, as well as investigating potential water in the Red Planet’s past, and Opportunity finding the first evidence that Mars could have once potentially sustained microbial life.

Both rovers far exceeded their expected operational lifespan of 90 sols (Martian days). Spirit continued to send back science data for six years, two months, and 19 days, while Opportunity kept chugging on still. But then, almost 15 years later, a planet-wide storm finally ended the rover. At this point it had exceeded its planned lifespan by 55 times, and had traveled more than 45 kilometers (28 miles), the first rover ever to complete a marathon on another planet.

When the storm hit, enveloping the planet, Opportunity went into hibernation. NASA attempted to contact the rover for over half a year, before finally calling time of death in February 2019.

“One of the most successful and enduring feats of interplanetary exploration, NASA’s Opportunity rover mission is at an end after almost 15 years exploring the surface of Mars and helping lay the groundwork for NASA’s return to the Red Planet,” NASA said at the time.

“The Opportunity rover stopped communicating with Earth when a severe Mars-wide dust storm blanketed its location in June 2018. After more than a thousand commands to restore contact, engineers in the Space Flight Operations Facility at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) made their last attempt to revive Opportunity Tuesday, to no avail. The solar-powered rover’s final communication was received June 10.”

Shortly after the announcement, several news outlets reported that the rover’s final communication was the words “my battery is low and it’s getting dark”. But of course, this would be a baffling message to receive from the rover, which does not communicate in words. In fact, as Snopes points out, that was a rough translation by science journalist Jacob Margolis, who was summarizing what two NASA engineers on the mission told him.

“It also told us the skies were incredibly dark, to the point where no sunlight gets through. It’s night time during the day,” project manager John Callas told Margolis of the final message.

“We were hopeful that the rover could ride it out. That the rover would hunker down, and then when the storm cleared, the rover would charge back up. That didn’t happen. At least it didn’t tell us that it happened. So, we don’t know.”

The final message actually came in the form of an equally haunting image.

“Taken on June 10, 2018 (the 5,111th Martian day, or sol, of the mission) this ‘noisy,’ incomplete image was the last data NASA’s Opportunity rover sent back from Perseverance Valley on Mars,” NASA explains of the image.

“Opportunity took this image with the left eye of the Pancam, with its solar filter pointed at the Sun. But since the dust storm blotted out the Sun, the image is dark. The white speckles are noise from the camera. All Pancam images have noise in them, but the darkness makes it more apparent. The transmission stopped before the full image was transmitted, leaving the bottom of the image incomplete, represented here as black pixels.”

And with that, Opportunity rested. It did a good job.