February 5, 2016: Opportunity Turns 12! Embarks on Electric Slide: Opportunity, stationed along Knudsen Ridge inside Marathon Valley at Endeavour Crater, defied the brutal cold of her seventh Martian winter in January, completing the study of an outcrop, navigating treacherous, steep slopes, and logging another productive month of exploration on the Red Planet. Along the way, something much grander happened.
On January 24th, the veteran Mars Exploration Rover (MER) wrapped the last day of her 12th year of surface operations on Mars, marking an extraordinary, historic achievement for the Mars Exploration Rovers (MER) mission.
“These milestones are in a sense arbitrary, but they do carry real significance,” reflected Steve Squyres, MER principal investigator, of Cornell University.
In the case of MER, it would not be an exaggeration to push that to ‘great significance.’ Opportunity and her twin Spirit were originally each slated to explore for 90 days and drive 600 meters. No one outside the team thought they would make it to the surface in one piece. And no one thought they would last through the first Martian winter. [More at link]