I can’t finish thi-
“My battery is low and it’s getting dark” “I am safe on Mars” is not something you’d expect to see on your Twitter feed without thinking it was a brand-new trend or a meme. And yet it was the update posted by the account for NASA’s Perseverance rover (@NASAPersevere) after it made its final descent to the Red Planet on 18th Feb 2021. Thousands of people were glued to their screens watching the countdown broadcast or reading the live c om m e n t a r y i n anticipation of a successful landing. Up until today, Perseverance tweets in the firstperson, keeping people updated with its exploits: photography, collecting rocks, and off-roading, which are even listed as its “hobbies” in its Twitter bio. But how did we get here – or more precisely – there? Since the 1970s, scientists have been sending spacecraft to Mars, all of which have different specialties. For example, orbiters fly around Mars collecting data on the weather and mapping; landers would perform experiments as far as their robotic arms would allow; and rovers have wheels and specialise in moving around. The
Natallia Valadzko
goals of NASA’s Mars Exploration program have been determining whether life ever arose on Mars, characterising the planet’s climate and geology, and preparing for human exploration. Perseverance is the fifth rover on Mars. But perhaps Opportunity, or Oppy, has proved to be the most renowned so far. Opportunity and Spirit, often referred to as brothers or twins, were launched in 2003 to land on Mars to traverse the Red Planet in search of signs of past life. The mission was planned to last 90 days. To everybody’s enormous surprise, the rover’s activity has far outlasted this period, reaching 14 years of operating on Mars. 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 made their last attempt to revive Opportunity in February, 2019, but to no avail. One journalist tweeted his translation of the last data transmission sent by Opportunity in June 2018, as “My battery is low and it’s getting dark”. The 4
