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This article is more than 1 year old

Sorry, but NASA says Mars signal wasn't Opportunity knocking

Mislabelled signal raised rover fans' hopes, just for a while

Space-fans pricked up their Twitter-ears today, when just for a few minutes it looked like the little lost rover Opportunity had woken up.

Opportunity has been silent since June, when a massive dust storm blocked its solar panels from charging its battery.

At the time, NASA boffins explained it would have put itself in a minimum-power mode, drawing enough current to keep its clock ticking over and not much more.

Mission operators kept listening, in the hope that wind would blow enough dust off the panels to wake the rover, and today it briefly looked like that had happened, when the Deep Space Network downloaded an 11 bytes/second signal from the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter marked “OPPY”.

Alas, this was not Opportunity phoning home, but a mis-labelled signal, as NASA had to explain:

So it's back to listening and hoping. Here at Vulture West we're crossing fingers and toes. ®

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