August 1, 2018: Dust Storm Wanes, Opportunity Sleeps, Team Prepares Recovery Strategy: Opportunity may be seeing the light again, a little sunlight that is.
As the veteran Mars Exploration Rover (MER) slept in Endeavour Crater’s Perseverance Valley under the thick cloud of dust that has blanketed the Red Planet for the last six weeks, scientists who are studying the monster storm that forced the robot field geologist into its hibernation mode are now reporting the tempest has peaked. (…)
The MER ops team, however, isn’t sitting around as they wait, but rather working even harder, if that’s possible. The team officials are hard at work putting together the recovery strategy plan for when Opportunity phones home, assuming, of course, that she does, and other team members are contributing to that process in whatever ways they can. (…)
What the MER team knows for certain is what they still don’t know. “There are many different scenarios and many different possibilities when it comes to what state, what condition Opportunity is in,” said Lever. “I’ve shot back and forth between all the different scenarios, but we’re guessing here. We will not have any answers until we hear from Opportunity and get some actual data,” he reiterated… [More at link]