Good Night Oppy

[DanaK]

Amazon documentary about the Mars rover Opportunity. Streams starting Nov 23

[SoMuchTV]

No one else? I just watched this on Prime. Very well done. I did not expect to tear up multiple times for space robot wake up songs. “Here Comes the Sun”?  “I’ll Be Seeing You“?

 

[Bastet]

On 5/27/2023 at 6:26 PM, SoMuchTV said:

No one else? I just watched this on Prime. Very well done. I did not expect to tear up multiple times for space robot wake up songs.

I watched it in bed this morning with my cat, and when it ended she woke up distressed something was wrong with me.  I had to explain everything was okay, Mommy was just crying over a robot.  "I'll Be Seeing You" as the final song really got me.  (And, wow, they picked some great ones along the way.)

I enjoyed this.  I was fascinated by astronauts and the space program as a kid, but I really soured on NASA after learning of their actions leading to the Challenger and Columbia disasters.  So by the time of these Mars rovers, I wasn't paying a lot of attention to what they were doing.  I was expecting the team to consist of a bunch of white men, so I was thrilled so see far more diversity than I expected.  The woman who said she was fascinated by her dad's rocket stories from his days in the Army Corps of Engineers, but aerospace engineering was not something girls around her went on to do, so she couldn't even conceive back then of some day sending a rocket to Mars really touched me.  I also loved the man from Ghana who opened up a radio when he was a kid, and was disappointed to find there weren't people in there. 

The autonomy built into the rovers and what they did with that ability was quite interesting.

It was notable that, the mission having gone on so exponentially longer than it was ever envisioned, by the end the team mostly consisted of different people.  It was really cool that a woman who'd stood there as a high school student when Opportunity found bedrock, not understanding why that excited everyone, was now there as a member of the team.

This is the NASA Americans can be proud of.

My only quibble was including the "My battery is low and it is getting dark" message that never actually happened.  The rover sent data, not words, revealing there was basically no power left and the sky was completely dark during the daytime.  In tweeting about NASA's announcement Opportunity was officially dead, a science journalist explained the sequence of events and said, of that last data transmission, "The last message they received was basically, 'My battery is low and it’s getting dark.'” Some outlets picked that up, but reported those as the rover's actual last words, and people went nuts for it.  The poor folks at JPL got so many calls about it, they contacted the reporter and asked him to clarify those were his own words summarizing what the data revealed, which he did, but of course that didn't get anywhere near as much attention so a lot of people still think it's real.  And now this made it seem like it was.

Alas, I kind of understand finding it too hard to resist -- of course they had to "translate" the data into verbal messages for them to have any meaning to us (and I LOL at "It's safe to proceed, that's just your shadow"), and that's certainly a translation that resonates.  I started to get teary at that before I remembered the real story.