NASA baws meeting up at Sonic over Opportunity rover

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Mars just had a planet wide dust storm and they’re debating on whether to try and save Opportunity because of costs



Members of Opportunity’s engineering team recommended a different plan, the person close to the mission says. Their idea was to actively try to communicate with Opportunity until the end of January 2019 — the end of the seasonal cleaning period. After that, they suggested passive listening until the end of 2019. But these recommendations were ignored by management in order to save money, this person says, meaning the agency could be risking abandoning a still-functioning rover. The Opportunity team reportedly didn’t receive formal notice of the plan until “minutes before JPL published its press release,” according to The Atlantic.

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NASA’s plan is “100% Grade A B.S.,” former Opportunity flight director Mike Seibert said on Twitter. “[T]he amount of time given to recover Opportunity is woefully insufficient. Whomever made this decision is a coward.” Someone at NASA “has to be trying to kill the mission for non-technical reasons,” he said.

“I will guaran-damn-tee you this decision is not consistent with the engineering recommendation from the team,” Scott Maxwell, a former Opportunity operator, tweeted. “They’re far too good at their jobs to have crafted anything so ridiculous.”