Good Night Oppy Ending Explained: “Good Night Oppy” is a documentary telling us about the MARS Mission that featured Spirit & Opportunity Rovers that went to MARS as geologists to understand the habitat from the bedrock of the planet so we could understand if water once exists on the RED Planet which lies the closest to us and with those answers, we could understand more towards our problems on Earth and how to best tackle them.
There’s a very interesting part in the documentary where Ashitey Trebi-Ollennu tells us that right from when mankind civilized themselves, the very first thing that they did was “Look to the heavens” and after understanding the times, they created calendars and decided when do they need to harvest and when not so space exploration has been with us right from the start and what they at NASA are doing is exactly that.
The documentary tells us the extraordinary story of two identical sister rovers, named Spirit and Opportunity who were sent to MARS to collect geological data and images. Both of them were sent to MARS with an interval of a week and were destined to land at two different corners of the planet where they would do their exploration.
What we’re presented with are the love and feelings that the scientists at NASA felt towards these robots that they became their families and they weren’t just machines anymore. We’re also presented with the two rovers as someone human who is doing these explorations and experiencing troubles like a normal person.
It wasn’t an easy journey for Spirit and Opportunity, especially Spirit as she landed on the rough terrain part of MARS, and even though both of the rovers much exceeded their original expected time on MARS which was just 90 SOLS (1 day in MARS is called 1 SOL) and managed to do more than 5000 SOLS.
Spirit who was on a rocky terrain stopped working on May 25, 2011, after her launch on January 3, 2004, after her front right wheel had stopped working quite a while ago so the team thought of moving her backward and not forward.
After that, it was only Opportunity who was going and at that point, Opportunity had done collecting craters like Endurance, Victoria but then it moved to another one which was way bigger than they had ever encountered called Endeavour which was miles and miles away, and probably will take years to reach there but Opportunity went on an adventure and it did reach there, collect the data and send it as well but along the way, past her prime and in the arduous climate of MARS in the hypothermic winters and dust storms, Opportunity had become arthritic and forgetful.
She would forget all of the data she had collected once she woke up the next day for which the scientists came up with a solution. What was one of the major emotional parts of the whole documentary was that it has been close to 15 years since they saw their rover and pitched an idea to the scientists that they want the rover to take a selfie well, the scientists agree and in the end, they get a collection of thumbnails which put together is a blurry image of Opportunity but it still is a picture.
After 15 years into its mission, receiving 13,744 command files and lasting 5262 SOLS, Opportunity’s journey came to an end on February 12, 2019.
Opportunity, also called as The Lucky Rover did ground-breaking work on its mission and has been an inspiration for many all around the world.