NASA spots silent Mars Opportunity rover from space
NASA got its first look at the Mars Opportunity rover months after it went radio silent following a dust storm.
The agency's Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO) captured an image of the Red Planet featuring a tiny blip identified as Opportunity. NASA released the image of Opportunity on Tuesday.
The rover was spotted on the planet's Perseverance Valley, where it was navigating at the time a dust storm hit the area in May.
The dust storm limited sunlight on the planet, forcing the solar-powered rover to go into a hibernation mode.
Two weeks ago, NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory started increasing the frequency of signals to Opportunity in an attempt to wake the rover back up.
"Morale has been a little shaky," Michael Staab, an engineer for the program at Jet Propulsion Laboratory, told Space.com in August. "This is the first time she [Opportunity] has stopped talking to us and not resumed communication when we expected."
In August, engineers created a playlist of songs and beamed it to Opportunity to get the rover to reawaken.
Opportunity had been roving Mars' landscape since reaching the planet in 2004.
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