Wednesday, February 27, 2019

Opportunity's Final Call

Tim Lennox includes news items of note on his blog each day. Last week he shared the news of the last photo taken by the Mars Rover, Opportunity.


From the NASA press release:

Yesterday, Nasa told the world that it’s most successful space voyager ‘Opportunity‘ Mars Rover was dead eight months after it was caught in a gigantic Martian dust storm. The solar-powered rover last communicated with Earth on June 10, 2018 just as a planet-wide dust storm was covering the Red Planet. NASA had launched the twin rovers Opportunity and Spirit in 2003 to explore Martian rocks and soil. Spirit has not been operational for several years but Opportunity persevered.

On Mars Rover Opportunity's final photograph:

Bill Nelson, chief of the Opportunity mission’s engineering team at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, said in an interview just after NASA declared the mission over. “This was the last image we ever took. We are looking at an incredibly small amount of sunlight — .002 percent of the normal sunlight that we would expect to see. If you were there, it would be late twilight. Your human eye would still be able to make out some features, but it would be very dark.”

Here is my own poem inspired by the news and the photo from NASA: 

Opportunity’s Last Call

One day,
In my ninth grade civics class
Taught by the coach
In the classroom by the gym,
There came a knock at the door.

“Open the door,” Coach said,
“It might be opportunity!”
To my young teenage self,
“Opportunity knocks” was already
Old hat enough
For me to laugh at Coach’s pun.

The living never cease
To look for opportunity.
It comes in all shades:
    great opportunity
    poor opportunity
    limited opportunity
    new opportunity
    missed opportunity
    last opportunity
    have I got an opportunity for you!
And it always comes with a promise
Wearing a smile
And raising an inquisitive brow.

Most live for it.
Some die for it.

On a distant Martian plain
Opportunity traveled much longer
Than the experts predicted.
New Opportunity
Became on-going Opportunity
Became continued Opportunity
Became old hat
Until that last grainy transmission
Of off-world twilight
Signaled one more lost Opportunity.

                                                        ~ CK




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1 comment:

  1. I like it. Makes me think forward, and backwards. I imagine Opportunity in the sunshine and waking again, renewed.

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