A replica of Mars Rover saved for display at Visvesvaraya Industrial & Technological Museum in Bengaluru on June 1, 2023.
| Photo Credit: Sudhakara Jain
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 obtained from the US Consulate General in Chennai, was inaugurated on Thursday by M. Sankaran, director, UR Rao Satellite Centre.
VITM mentioned the Mars Rover Opportunity mannequin, which was constructed by college students of Cornell University within the US, was initially on display at the Smithsonian’s Air and Space Museum in Dulles, Virginia and later exhibited within the US Pavilion throughout the 2020 World Expo in Dubai.
The replica was then obtained by the American Center within the US Consulate in Chennai the place it was on display from November 2022 to March 2023.
What was Mars Rover Opportunity?
The Mars Rover Opportunity was the second of the 2 rovers launched by NASA in 2003 to land on Mars and start traversing the Red Planet in the hunt for indicators of historic water.
After touchdown on Mars in 2004, Opportunity made a variety of discoveries in regards to the Red Planet, together with dramatic proof that at least one space of Mars stayed moist for an prolonged interval and that circumstances may have been appropriate for sustaining microbial life.
The Opportunity rover explored the Martian terrain for nearly 15 years, far outlanding her deliberate 90 mission. The rover stopped speaking with Earth when a extreme Mars-wide mud storm blanketed its location in June 2018.
After greater than a thousand instructions to restore contact, engineers within the Mission Control at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory made their final try to revive Opportunity on February 13, 2019, to no avail.
The solar-powered rover’s remaining communication was obtained on June 10, 2018.
VITM, which attracts about a million guests yearly, mentioned that it’s planning to construct numerous actions across the Mars Rover and area exploration for college students and guests.
