The Top 5 Things to Look Forward to on Mars in 2019

The past year was an exciting one for the Red Planet: Opportunity and Curiosity passed major operational milestones, the InSight lander joined the robotic fleet on the surface, and big discoveries like a possible underground lake were announced. What does the coming year have in store for us?

1. #WakeUpOppy

January 24, 2019 marks the 15th anniversary of the Opportunity rover’s landing on Mars. With a primary mission length of only 90 martian days (“sols”), our little rover had wildly surpassed its warranty and all expectations by June of 2018, when it was slammed with the largest dust storm we’ve ever observed on Mars. On sol 5111 of its mission, contact with “Oppy” was lost when dust lofted by the storm blocked so much sun, day essentially became night. Since Opportunity is solar powered, the darkness meant power dropped to perilous levels, and (we think) the rover put itself into hibernation mode to keep itself alive. Even after the dust storm dissipated however, Opportunity didn’t phone home. Images from the High Resolution Imaging Science Experiment (HiRISE) camera in orbit of Mars showed that the solar panels appeared to be coated in dust—perhaps enough to prevent the batteries from charging back up.

Oppy—the tiny dot in the centre of the white square—as viewed by HiRISE on September 20, 2018, after the dust storm had substantially cleared. Nice, clean solar panels on the rovers are blue in HiRISE images, but there’s not much blue to be seen here, a sign that the panels were coated in dust when this image was taken. Image credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/University of Arizona

By now, this probably sounds like a bleak tale to you, and a sad fate for poor Oppy. But not…