I’ve been following the news on the Mars Rover that is scouting Mars since the day it landed. What a successful mission it has been… up to now. The Mars rover has hit its first snag, one of the Rovers two on-board computers became corrupted, and started sending odd commands back home. And after investigation by the Curiosity “anomaly team” the decision was made to switch over all important computations from the A computer, to the back-up B. And on doing so, the rover promptly locked up into safe-mode. The hope is that Curiosity can be back up and running on its B-side, with A restored as a backup, in a week or so.

 

In the meantime, Curiosity is sitting alone on Mars, holding powdered rock from the red planet itself, unable to do anything with it. And by the time it can, the Sun could be blocking messages home for a month. This makes me think about the first rover (Opportunity) that was sent to Mars nine years ago, and sadly had to give the attention and limelight to its much bigger cousin Curiosity that landed August 2012. Even though Opportunity is still chugging along, all the focus is on Curiosity. People grew quite fond of the comic tweets this first Rover gave, just as they are growing fond of Curiosities’ tweets:

 

Here’s the latest (and possibly last ever) tweet from Opportunity:

 

Mars-Opportunity-last-tweet

Latest tweet from Curiosity:

Mars-curiosity-tweet

 

I find it amazing that we can navigate a little robot millions of miles away on a distant planet, what wonders technology has given us!