No sign of NASA’s Mars rover despite dust storm subsiding

In a good news, the Martian global dust storm has started to subside, however, NASA’s Mars rover is still nowhere to be found yet.

Mars was going through a massive dust storm since the past few months that covered the entire planet and even forced NASA to shut off its Opportunity Rover. Fortunately, the storm has started to die down since the past three weeks, but unfortunately, the rover hasn’t sent back any signal and there is no clue about it.

“Morale has been a little shaky. This is the first time she has stopped talking to us and not resumed communication when we expected,” Michael Staab of NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) told Space.com.

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The solar-powered Opportunity rover ran out of battery in mid-June and was forced to go into dormant standby mode. Because of the dust storm blocking out the sun, the rover was unable to power up, but the engineers were optimistic that the rover would wake up once the skies are clear.

But now, with the start of settlement of the storm, enough light should be pushing its way down to the surface to begin recharging the Opportunity’s batteries again, but this is not what’s happening for now, reported BGR.

The last signal from the Opportunity rover came on June 10, however, back in July NASA suggested that the rover had experience a low-power fault, possibly a mission-clock fault and uplink-loss fault. The JPL team listens daily and send a command thrice a week to the rover in case it wakes up again, reported Orlando Sentinal.

“We still haven’t heard from it. A variety of scientists think early to mid-September might be a time when the skies clear enough that it could recharge,” Mars’ technology media relations specialist Andrew Good informed Inverse.

Meanwhile, NASA’s another Curiosity rover on Mars was not affected by the storm since it runs of nuclear-powered battery and thus, its mission remains unaffected.