LONDON: If slow and steady wins the race, then NASA’s Mars rover Opportunity takes first place. In March, more than 11 years after it landed on the Red Planet, the scrappy little robot completed 26.2 miles, or the length of a full marathon – and now you can watch its entire epic journey in this eight-minute video.
The images in the video were taken with the rover’s hazard-avoidance cameras between January 2004 and April 2015, and the crunchy-gravel soundtrack comes from vibration measurements from the robot’s accelerometer, to give a sense of how rough the going could get.
When Opportunity and its twin rover Spirit landed in January 2004, they were scheduled for a 90-day run. But the hardy six-wheeled robots kept up exploring for years, enduring fierce dust storms and treacherous terrain. Spirit succumbed to a sand trap in 2009; NASA sent its final commands to the rover in 2011. But Opportunity is still going strong, outlasting its original mission roughly 45 times over.
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