Visitors to the Visvesvaraya Industrial and Technological Museum (VITM), Bengaluru will get to see a full scale replica of NASA’s Mars Rover Opportunity which is on exhibit at the museum’s Space Technology Gallery.
The full scale replica of Mars Rover Opportunity, which was received from the US Consulate General in Chennai, was inaugurated on Thursday by M. Sankaran, director, UR Rao Satellite Centre.
VITM said the Mars Rover Opportunity model, which was built by students of Cornell University in the US, was initially on display at the Smithsonian’s Air and Space Museum in Dulles, Virginia and later exhibited in the US Pavilion during the 2020 World Expo in Dubai.
The replica was then received by the American Center in the US Consulate in Chennai where it was on display from November 2022 to March 2023.
What was Mars Rover Opportunity?
The Mars Rover Opportunity was the second of the two rovers launched by NASA in 2003 to land on Mars and begin traversing the Red Planet in search of signs of ancient water.
After landing on Mars in 2004, Opportunity made a number of discoveries about the Red Planet, including dramatic evidence that at least one area of Mars stayed wet for an extended period and that conditions could have been suitable for sustaining microbial life.
The Opportunity rover explored the Martian terrain for almost 15 years, far outlanding her planned 90 mission. The rover stopped communicating with Earth when a severe Mars-wide dust storm blanketed its location in June 2018.
After more than a thousand commands to restore contact, engineers in the Mission Control at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory made their last attempt to revive Opportunity on February 13, 2019, to no avail.
The solar-powered rover’s final communication was received on June 10, 2018.
VITM, which attracts about one million visitors every year, said that it is planning to build various activities around the Mars Rover and space exploration for students and visitors.
