"We were really enjoying ourselves, you know, as part of making it fun for us and fun for the public, too."
This one was just too sweet to pass up, so even though it happened last week, I figured we'd talk about it, in case you missed it. Last week, you may have heard that the Mars Opportunity rover sent out a final message: "My battery is low and it's getting dark." While that is just a poetic translation of the data dump that the robot sent to indicate low battery, the way NASA responded to the rover wrapping up its 15-year exploration of the surface of Mars was fairly sweet. The tune was Billie Holiday's 'I'll Be Seeing You', which ends with the words:I'll find you in the morning sun And when the night is new I'll be looking at the moon But I'll be seeing you
But no response came back from space. Nasa flight controllers only heard silence. Thomas Zurbuchen, head of NASA’s science missions, broke the news at what amounted to a funeral at the space agency’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California, announcing the demise of “our beloved Opportunity.” “This is a hard day,” project manager John Callas said at an auditorium packed with hundreds of current and former members of the team that oversaw Opportunity and its long-deceased identical twin, Spirit. “Even though it’s a machine and we’re saying goodbye, it’s still very hard and very poignant, but we had to do that. We came to that point.” It meant Opportunity's final message was made in June 2018, to the effect of "my battery is low and it's getting dark". Then, without consulting each other, individual members of the MER team all began to beam wake-up songs to Opportunity again. They picked songs that would jolt a sleep-deprived scientist out of bed: “For a time, they were all about high energy, let’s get going.” They played songs like “Start Me Up,” by the Rolling Stones, and “Kickstart My Heart,” by Mötley Crüe. “We had quite a bag of tricks of things to try to regain contact with the rover,” Dr. Squyres says. “We got all the way to the bottom of the bag.” “Nothing ever worked,” he says. “We tried eight months. Eight months. We tried everything that you could try and it just got down to the end and we’d done everything we could do.” But before they declared the mission over, Dr. Squyres had one last message to send to Mars: “the final wake up song.” Only, this time, there was no expectation of the song working. Dr. Squyres chose the jazz standard, “I’ll Be Seeing You” (1944), as sung by Billie Holiday.