Griffin Patterson

2/13/19

Biology

Current event 3

Grossman, Lisa. “After 15 Years on Mars, It's the End of the Road for Opportunity.” Science News, 13 Feb. 2019, www.sciencenews.org/article/nasa-mars-opportunity-rover-dead.

https://www.sciencenews.org/article/nasa-mars-opportunity-rover-dead

For current event 3 I chose a very interesting and a little disappointing article that revolves around the NASA not be able to try to land on mars very again.  First of all the mars rover was lost by NASA in a huge dust storm on mars. Overall, Opportunity has finally run out of, well, opportunities. After weeks of trying to revive the veteran Mars rover in the wake of a blinding dust storm, NASA has given up on ever hearing from it again. NASA officially stated that they were never trying to fly and go to mars again when they said “I was there with the team as these commands went out into the deep sky,” Thomas Zurbuchen, the associate administrator of NASA's Science Mission Directorate, said in a news conference at the Jet  Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif. “I learned this morning that we had not heard back, and our beloved Opportunity remains silent. It is therefore that I am standing here with a sense of deep appreciation and gratitude that I declare the Opportunity mission as complete, and with it the Mars Exploration Rover mission as complete.” this statement by the NASA officials is leading towards the fact that they are never trying to go on mars again which is very disappointing. This is disappointing because there are many resources and other things we haven't found on mars yet NASA is going to stop.

When Lisa grossman released this article it overall shocked society and our world. She started off the article telling us the horrible news of that NASA isn't trying to go back in mars. This really affects the US, because we could be the ones that find certain things on mars that could make it habitable. She mentions that they found yet another supply of water which nudges toward the fact that life could eventually live there. The One thing scientists do know is that the Endeavour crater was once yet another watery environment, with chemistry that would have been favorable to life if anything had lived there. Water interacted with the rock multiple times. One of the best pieces of evidence for water at Endeavour crater is this vein of gypsum, spotted in November 2011. Again, our society is very affected by this news and decision making. In the future if we need a place off earth to live and we don't know where to go, mars would maybe be a spot if NASA would go back up there. It is just the fact that not knowing if we could live on mars causes a panic between americans if we need a new planet to stay on way in the future. So, hopefully we would go up there and figure that out now but NASA is putting a stop to it.

Overall, Lisa Grossman wrote a very strong and informational article. She clearly researched on this topic a lot and brought a lot of outside information. Throughout the article she brought positive facts from the last rover on mars. She brought positive facts of what we found on mars and what the rover did for NASA and the USA. Although these are very good facts, she talks about facts the whole article and doesn't talk about her personal opinion. Her personal opinion would have helped in this article because it would have brought outsider information and  not just facts about the river itself. I wanted to overall hear more about how she feels about NASA not going to mars anymore but, this article overall was very good for the explanation of the actions that the rover did and how grateful we should be for all the facts we have about mars because of it.