NASA has given up hope of re-contacting its Mars Rover ‘Opportunity’ having lost complete contact with the robot last June.
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A massive, record-breaking dust storm hit Mars and as that was happening Opportunity sent back a final disturbing message to the crew, which has finally been revealed this week.
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Here’s what it said…
I’m sorry, I just found out the last message sent by the Mars rover was “my battery is low and it is getting dark,” so now I have to spend the rest of the day watching WALL-E and sobbing.
— Louis Peitzman (@LouisPeitzman) February 13, 2019
Project manager John Callas confirmed:
We tried valiantly over these last eight months to recover the rover, to get some signal from it
We’ve listened every single day with sensitive receivers, and we sent over 1,000 recovery commands. We heard nothing and the time has come to say goodbye.
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I don’t know about you guys, but I am practically in tears right now. I mean that might be the saddest thing I’ve ever read in my life. Imagine some poor robot out there struggling all alone on Mars and the final message it ever beams back to Earth is “my battery is low and it’s very, very dark”. And then nothing. Just profoundly depressing and hopeless.
Probably not a great look for us humans when the rest of the AI robots find out about this too. Especially the advanced Japanese killer robot that nearly assassinated Barack Obama that one time.
