NASA Sends New Commands to Mars Opportunity Rover

By Catie Keck on 27 Jan 2019 at 4:00AM

NASA’s beloved Mars rover Opportunity has been silent for months after getting swept up in an enormous dust storm on the Red Planet last summer, and NASA engineers have been pinging the rover to answer to no avail. Now, NASA says it will send new commands to the resilient explorer in hopes of waking it up, even as the possibility that it will awaken becomes increasingly uncertain.

These new efforts to contact the 15-year-old rover will go on for several weeks and will address three possibilities, according to an update from the space agency, namely that Opportunity is experiencing problems with its radios or internal clock. NASA called the circumstances that would have resulted in the specific problems it’s addressing “unlikely,” but Opportunity’s team hasn’t lost hope yet.

“We have and will continue to use multiple techniques in our attempts to contact the rover,” John Callas, project manager for Opportunity at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL), said in a statement. “These new command strategies are in addition to the ‘sweep and beep’ commands we have been transmitting up to the rover since September.”

Opportunity went quiet in June following a massive Martian dust storm—the strongest ever observed on the planet—and NASA engineers believed that the solar-powered rover went into hibernation mode to save what power it had left. They hoped that strong winds during a subsequent “dust-clearing season” would help clear its solar panels and allow it to power back up, but no luck thus far.

More:
http://www.gizmodo.co.uk/2019/01/wake-up-oppy-nasa-sends-new-commands-to-mars-opportunity-rover/