this morning NASA abandoned their mars rover Opportunity (aka Oppy) because it (she) got hit by a storm on Mars and it knocked her camera and wheels out and her last words to the team were “my battery is low and it is getting cold”. I know she’s a machine but I’m devastated. Oppy is the one who discovered water on Mars. RIP oppy ily space baby
they didn’t abandon her!! they tried eight months to reach her!!!! as their last farewell to her yesterday they played her “I’ll be seeing you” by Billie Holiday:
“I’ll find you in the morning sun
And when the night is new
I’ll be looking at the moon
But I’ll be seeing you”
They love her so much and they tried so hard!!!
Oh man, It doesn’t end there.
This isn’t the first song NASA sent Opportunity. They had a playlist:
It’s on Spotify, it’s called “Opportunity, wake up!“
This is what’s great about NASA and it’s what’s great about people. These are world-class engineers. When they sent a rover to another planet they could have easily looked at it as just another scientific tool. But people don’t do that. We can and will get emotionally attached to the most inanimate of objects. We can and will anthropomorphize anything. And frankly Opportunity’s camera mast looks like a little face with eyes and everything, so why not?
So they started calling it her.
They nicknamed her Oppy.
They told her to take a selfie not long ago.
After 15 years of Oppy flipping the double bird to her original 90 day life expectancy, when a planet-spanning dust storm finally knocked her out and she stopped responding to the engineer’s wake-up messages, they started playing music for her.
And after 8 months and almost 1000 unanswered wake-up messages, when it was finally clear that Oppy was never going to wake up, the last thing these world-class NASA engineers did for their little rover on another planet
I’m seeing some people confused about why so many others are genuinely crying about a robot that’s a million miles away that happened to run out of power. I can’t speak to each individual experience, but I can speak to mine.
Scientific institutions whose primary goal is to explore and expand knowledge is completely divorced from the brutal, cold logic of markets or nations. They exist to expand our understanding of a universe that is so large we can’t conceptualise its size in physical terms. They are exploring depths so deep we don’t have language for it. These goals are purely altruistic and deeply emotional; they function on the assumption that human beings are worthy of knowing more. When we look up and see the infinite vast of space, it’s a collective, united step towards another sliver of understanding.
Opportunity’s name itself is highly personal and empathetic. She is a symbol of our curiosity and hope and yearning. She is our brightest wishes and deepest desires to know our true place in this infinite space, and her death marks an end to one of these journeys. We will make so many more, but she forged a path longer than anybody thought possible, and there is nothing more human than defying the odds set by the previous, more narrow assumptions of the universe.
It is a robot, but it is more than the sum of its parts.
