'Overachieving' Mars rover Opportunity mission over after 15 years
Science
I wanted to say with the completion of tonight's commanding, this concludes operations for MUR 1, spacecraft ID 253.
And on behalf of the entire MUR project we'd like to thank the DSN for over fifteen and a half years of outstanding support from launch until tonight.
That support is one of the reasons why this mission has been so successful.
And once again, the DSN has helped us to make history, thank you.
[BLANK_AUDIO]
And this is station 14.
I'll be off of the network.
Thank you for your comments and [INAUDIBLE]
for all of us.
14, you are released.
[INAUDIBLE]
Murr project off the net.
[APPLAUSE]
This is a celebration
Of so many achievements.
And I'll just start by saying, when this little rover landed the objective was to have it being able to move 1,100 yards and survive for 90 days on Mars, 90 sols.
And instead here we are 14 years later after 28 miles of travel and today we get to celebrate the end of this mission.
So it's an honor for me as a NASA administrator to come out here to this amazing facility with so many amazingly talented people to say thank you for your great work Not just for our country but for the science that people are gonna be benefiting all over the world.
They're gonna be benefitting from this science for years to come and so now I'd like to take the opportunity to introduce the director of the Jet Propulsion Laboratory Mike Watkins.
Thank you, Jim.
Spirit and Opportunity may be gone but they leave us a legacy.
and that's a legacy of a new paradigm for socialism explanation.
A robotic geologist on Mars and an integrated science and engineering operations team here on Earth, all set up together on a mission of discovery.
They didn't know what they would find.
They didn't know which direction they would go, sometimes from one day to the next [LAUGH]
And they made it work, and they made it work longer than any of us thought possible by both brilliant scientific deduction of where to go and brilliant engineering to keep the rovers alive.
[BLANK_AUDIO]
