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Early Preview to Good Night Oppy

On 30th Oct 2022, I had the opportunity to watch an Early Preview of the movie Good Night Oppy at the Chabot Space and Science Center in Oakland, CA.

Good Night Oppy is a movie about a Mars Rover called Opportunity, and various adventures it and its twin rover Spirit had, until both their missions ended. In this blog, I write about a few interesting details about the rovers that I think are worth highlighting.

10 Interesting Things

  1. The Spirit and Opportunity rovers were completely identical and effectively twins.

  2. The rovers were built in such a way that pictures taken from the cameras look as if a human was standing there on the surface.

  3. The two rovers, on their way to Mars, encountered a Solar Storm. This corrupted the software onboard and the Twin Rovers had to be rebooted.

  4. Spirit and Opportunity were only three weeks behind each other.

  5. In the landing procedure when the rover is just above the surface, the ropes would cut and enormous airbags around the rover would inflate, so that the rover could bounce along the surface and come to a full-stop safely.

  6. Both Rovers landed on opposite sides of Mars.

  7. Both Rovers were expected to survive for 90 days each, but both exceeded those expectations by a lot. Spirit survived for 6 years, and Opportunity survived for 14 years.

  8. The reason why they were expected to survive for 90 days was because the Solar Panels the rovers used would eventually get covered by dust, effectively shutting down the Rovers. Thankfully, dust devils on the surface of Mars would blow the dust off the solar panels, allowing the Rovers to still gather energy.

  9. Each of the Rovers had an Autonomous failsafe mechanism, which would override human commands(People sent commands to the rover to drive). For example, When Spirit touched a certain rock, the Autonomous failsafe mechanism kicked in and shut down the rover for a bit.

  10. The Opportunity rover was making great progress to a certain crater, when the team realized that the rover was, in fact, not moving at all and just digging itself into a hole while it thought it was moving toward its target. They had to drive it in reverse to get it out.

Summary

I strongly recommend watching the movie. It is available on Amazon Prime Video now.