200
votes
Was Opportunity's last message to Earth "My battery is low and it's getting dark"?
From a NASA blog post made the day after contact was lost:
The dust storm that is affecting Opportunity has greatly intensified.
The atmospheric opacity (tau) over the rover has increased to a record ...
- 12k
94
votes
Was Opportunity's last message to Earth "My battery is low and it's getting dark"?
Opportunity does not literally speak English, so no such message was expressed in those terms. However, Opportunity did communicate the information that it had a low battery and it was dark outside.
...
- 1,118
47
votes
Accepted
Was Opportunity's last message to Earth "My battery is low and it's getting dark"?
Other answers give good technical answers to what the last message would actually have looked like, but I thought it worth tackling the angle of where the quote came from.
Wikipedia cites an article ...
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18
votes
Did Curiosity rover land on Mars?
Did you ever see a video of a proto-boeing-787 flying before the testbed version of a boeing-787 flew? No, you didn't. Why not? Here's a craft that is designed to fly in earths atmosphere, and they ...
- 9,066
16
votes
Was Opportunity's last message to Earth "My battery is low and it's getting dark"?
This Metro article cites a tweet by Keri Bean, an engineer who worked on the opportunity mission who had Oppy’s final measurement tattooed on her arm.
This tattoo means more to me than just Oppy. ...
- 300
10
votes
Did Curiosity rover land on Mars?
In my experience most testing isn't particularly exciting and worth recording and sharing with the public.
Nevertheless, the NASA shared a lot of videos and photos showing the more visually ...
- 145k
5
votes
Did Curiosity rover land on Mars?
Do you realize Curiosity has been on Mars and sending data ever since then? Do you think that if they were hiding it in Canada, there would be no kink in this story for nearly 8 years?
Are you saying ...
Only top scored, non community-wiki answers of a minimum length are eligible