NASA Releases Opportunity Rover’s Final Photos of Mars

After eight months of effort and sending more than a thousand commands in an attempt to restore contact with the Mars rover Opportunity, NASA declared its mission complete on February 13, 2019. The newly-released images are the final photos Opportunity took on the Red Planet as a dust storm darkened the Martian sky.

These two thumbnail images are the final images Opportunity took on Mars as a dust storm darkened the sky. The left Pancam image has more wavy gradations. In the right Pancam image, the Sun appears as the larger whitish feature in the middle of the frame. Image credit: NASA / JPL-Caltech / Cornell / ASU.

On June 10, 2018 (the 5,111th Martian day, or Sol, of its mission), Opportunity captured two black-and-white images, with the ghostly dot of a faint Sun near the middle of each, in Perseverance Valley.

These ‘thumbnail’ images, from the left and right eyes of the rover’s Panoramic Camera (Pancam), were used to estimate how opaque the atmosphere (a measurement known as ‘tau’) was on that day.

With a tau of about 10.8 , the Opportunity team scientists knew that only a tiny amount of sunlight was getting through the dust.

While full-frame image versions are typically sent after thumbnails, the full-frame versions of these images with faint spots of Sun were never transmitted.

However, these thumbnails were not the final images transmitted by the rover — the last image sent is a partial full-frame image of a dark sky.

Taken on June 10, 2018, this noisy, incomplete image was the last data NASA’s Opportunity rover sent back from Mars. Image credit: NASA / JPL-Caltech / Cornell / ASU.

From May 13 through June 10, 2018 (5,084 through 5,111 sols), Opportunity documented a 360-degree panorama in Perseverance Valley.

“This final panorama embodies what made our Opportunity rover such a remarkable mission of exploration and discovery,” said Opportunity project manager Dr. John Callas, a researcher at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory.

“To the right of center you can see the rim of Endeavor Crater rising in the distance.”

This 360-degree panorama is composed of 354 images taken by Pancam from May 13 through June 10, 2018. This is the last panorama Opportunity acquired before the solar-powered rover succumbed to a global Martian dust storm on the same June 10. The view is presented in false color to make some differences between materials easier to see. To the right of center and near the top of the frame, the rim of Endeavour Crater rises in the distance. Just to the left of that, rover tracks begin their descent from over the horizon towards the location that would become Opportunity’s final resting spot in Perseverance Valley, where the panorama was taken. At the bottom, just left of center, is the rocky outcrop Opportunity was investigating with the instruments on its robotic arm. To the right of center and halfway down the frame is another rocky outcrop — about 23 feet (7 m ) distant from the camera — called ‘Ysleta del Sur,’ which Opportunity investigated from March 3 through 29, 2018. In the far right and left of the frame are the bottom of Perseverance Valley and the floor of Endeavour Crater. Located on the inner slope of the western rim of Endeavour Crater, Perseverance Valley is a system of shallow troughs descending eastward about the length of two football fields from the crest of Endeavour’s rim to its floor. This view combines images collected through three Pancam filters. The filters admit light centered on wavelengths of 753 nm (near-infrared), 535 nm (green) and 432 nm (blue). The three-color bands are combined. A few frames (bottom left) remain black and white, as the solar-powered rover did not have the time to photograph those locations using the green and violet filters before a severe Mars-wide dust storm swept in on June 2018. Image credit: NASA / JPL-Caltech / Cornell / ASU.

“Just to the left of that, rover tracks begin their descent from over the horizon and weave their way down to geologic features that our scientists wanted to examine up close,” he said.

“And to the far right and left are the bottom of Perseverance Valley and the floor of Endeavour Crater, pristine and unexplored, waiting for visits from future explorers.”