Amidst the breakneck pace of increasingly disturbing news commanding the headlines in America and around the world, something extraordinarily wonderful, something unifying for all Earthlings happened on the Red Planet, and it went all but unnoticed.

The Mars Explorations Rovers (MER) team quietly completed 14 years of surface operations and then Opportunity, the longest-lived robot on another planet, kept on roving into the mission’s 15th year and a whole new Martian scene. It is an unparalleled achievement in planetary exploration.

 A new Martian scene
NASA / JPL-Caltech / Cornell / ASU / S. Atkinson (right)

A NEW MARTIAN SCENE
Opportunity roved out of her 14th year of exploring Mars and into her 15th in January 2018 – and into a whole new Martian world with geological features the likes of which the MER scientists have never before seen on the Red Planet. The image on the left shows the interesting stone stripes the rover has been seeing; the image on the right, processed by Stuart Atkinson in his vibrant brand Martian color, shows what may be a new rock type, featuring pitted and textured surfaces.
Spirit and Opportunity were originally sent to opposite sides of Mars on three-month exploratory tours to look for signs of past water and perhaps characterize any places that may have been potential habitats where life could have emerged. The twins met those science objectives in their primary missions and then exceeded everyone’s wildest dreams. With their uncannily individual personalities and quirks, they also helped produce the most experienced Mars rover experts on Earth.

Inspired by the wonder of it all and the knowledge and technology that could be reaped, NASA’s motivation here was simple and pure: go where no Earthlings have gone before (but have always wanted to go) and explore, try to find out if Mars really was once like Earth, and show everyone this distant land looks like.

“It’s a remarkable thing,” reflected MER Principal Investigator Steve Squyres, of Cornell University. “It’s important to not lose that sense of wonder and that sense of how fortunate we are to be able to do what we do. Nobody got into this to get rich. Nobody got into this to get famous. We got into it because we love that feeling of exploration.”

Together, the MER team and its robots have and continue to explore, demonstrating what can happen when people bound by tried and true ethics work together for a common goal and a greater good. The upshot is history in the making: 14 years later Opportunity and the MER team are still roving, still setting records, and still making important discoveries, even with the bounty of data Spirit sent home years ago.

“Spirit and Opportunity helped to revolutionize our understanding of Mars as a planet,” said Planetary Society President Jim Bell, the lead scientist on the rovers’ Panoramic Cameras (Pancams), of Arizona State University (ASU). “Both rovers found evidence of ancient, habitable environments along their traverse paths over the years, helping us to provide ‘ground truth’ for orbital remote sensing data, and substantially extending the capabilities and interpretations that we can gain from those orbital perspectives.”