NASA’s Mars Rover Opportunity Concludes a 15-Year Mission
https://nyti.ms/2GHXivV

It's pursuits such as this that humans need to concentrate on. vs. constantly preparing for, and causing war.

What an awesome achievement.

It's final message was touching.

It is a machine.
A sad event anyway. More so for those who worked with it I assume.

JPL does a hell of a job.

I was at the ASU "mission control" landing party when it landed. Talk about high anxiety.

"On Saturday, January 24, at 10:05pm Arizona time, the Opportunity Rover, the second of NASA’s twin Mars Exploration Rovers (MER), landed on a very interesting part of Mars known as Meridiani Planum. A crowd of about 500 onlookers cheered as NASA executed a flawless landing in what turned out to be a small, shallow crater in an exotic gray plain, with weathered rock outcroppings. Arizona State University scientists watched it all unfold with anxiety, anticipation, jubilation and a great deal of personal and professional interest."

I showed the meme of Opportunity and its last words,"My batteries are low and it's getting dark," to a creative writing class last night. I asked them to give some thought to how readily we imbue inanimate objects with feelings and respond with feelings of our own. This tendency carries more than a little relevance for people who hope to be able to stir feeling with pixels on a screen or ink on a page.

But they didn't really have to give it much thought, because as soon as the image flashed on the screen, the whole room sighed and individuals started murmuring things like, "Oh, that's so sad."

I'm not sure if any of them had ever given Opportunity a second thought, but they responded to the idea of it dying alone, far from home, after doing its job faithfully for many years.

It's surprising how many people are expressing sadness over this. I understand it myself, but it seems to be some sort of universal thing.

And we also have this:

quote:

Meanwhile, Insight still has that alluring new probe smell.