A Space telescope, a Mars Rover and a nerdy kid fresh out of high school
I first learned about opportunity rover when its twin Spirit died in 2010. I was in the last year of high school. At that time I was learning about early space missions and lunar landings namely, the Voyagers and the Apollos. When I discovered this, I started following the mission as the mission goals made me extremely curious, you should check it out. You will go ‘Woah!’
Then in the same year, I learned that NASA was looking for Earth-like planets around Sun-like stars. I thought they were using the Hubble space telescope(HST),sidenote: HST is still going strong by the way and can go a couple of decades more if NASA has enough funding, but it turned out there was a new space telescope designed for this mission, The Kepler Space Telescope. Since I was already under the spell of Hubble’s deep space Images, I started checking up on the Kepler mission whenever I checked up on Hubble.
Well, now you might have heard Opportunity rover died on the 13th of February, and the Kepler mission concluded in late October 2018 as it ran out of juice. I am not crying… you are crying
For a nerdy kid fresh out of high school, Oppy and KST quickly became a regular thing to check up on. They were like friends, cooler than most of my actual friends! Don’t tell them I said that and yes, I have friends.
Now, about 9 years following both the missions, I learned a lot of stuff, sometimes, directly from the mission webpages and sometimes just flying off tangentially into the rabbit hole. What a journey it was. Kepler observed over 500 thousand stars and discovered nearly 3000 exoplanets and captured 61 supernovae. Spirit and opportunity together discovered that Mars had saltwater lakes as well as freshwater lakes in its ancient warmer times. They also discovered ancient Martian volcanos and hot springs and most importantly proved that Manned mission to Mars is possible by landing safely.
- Kepler Mission planned mission duration was 3.5 years and it lasted nearly a decade
- Spirit and Opportunity’s planned mission duration was 90 days and Opportunity lasted nearly 15 years.
I wish we could bring them back home and keep it a museum. I know that doesn’t make any logical sense and expensive af. In 2017 the Cassini mission concluded as well, which at the end of its mission days dove into Saturn’s atmosphere. The same fate awaits for Juno, currently orbiting Jupiter in the year 2021.
All these missions have successors and I am excited for them to begin their journey. More things to learn and cooler images to look at. InSight mission has already landed on Mars and its gonna drill into the surface. ISRO’s Mangalyaan - The Mars Orbiter mission is at mars since 2014. Mars 2020 Mission is due in a year. And the successor to Mangalyaan is due by 2022. There is also Exo-Mars Rover by the European Space Agency which will search for the building blocks for life and is named Rosalind Franklin. She is the scientist behind the discovery of the structure of DNA. How epic is that lineup!? And then there is SpaceX with their Starship aiming to send the first shipment of their cargo by 2022.
But I am most excited for the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST), which is being delayed for a while now and is expected to launch in March 2021. JWST is designed to peek further back into the early universe compared to the HST. It can look at stellar nurseries and protoplanetary systems and also the exo-planetary systems with a new and improved perspective, i.e., It works mostly in the infrared and far-infrared wavelengths. We might get to see things we didn’t expect to find… Can’t wait!
Okay, Bye!