djellison comments on To celebrate its 5,000th day on Mars, NASA last week commanded the Opportunity rover to take a self portrait with its microscope camera- something it was never designed to do.

djellison comments on To celebrate its 5,000th day on Mars, NASA last week commanded the Opportunity rover to take a self portrait with its microscope camera- something it was never designed to do.:

Why?

Because it was Sol 5000! That only happens once. Infact, it shouldn't have EVER happened - despite many armchair experts saying we knew they'd last longer the expected lifetime really wasn't beyond the 90-100 sol range. We're coming out of winter, our solar panels are fairly clean so we're generating quite a lot of power. To use it we keep the rover awake from when it gets it's uplink (around 11.30am rover time) until the one mars relay pass it usually gets per day ( around 6pm each day ). So there was plenty of time and power to do something a bit unusual.......so we took damn selfie because we can, and she's 5000 sols old, and we've never seen her like this before.

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