You may have heard that last week, NASA sent a last information request to the Mars Opportunity Rover and got no response. Opportunity was declared lost, after almost 15 years of Martian exploration. This expedition was supposed to last 90 days. Instead it lasted over half of my life. Opportunity traveled farther on Martian soil than anything else of Earth, and witnessed sights that we may never see any other way.
I was genuinely sad to hear of this robot's passing. To me, Opportunity and other exploratory probes/rovers/etc. like it represent a really amazing part of human nature. They exemplify that endlessly curious part of us that looks up at the stars and wants to touch them. We want to walk on other planets and soar past the edges of the solar system, and since we are fragile creatures, we build things that can do it for us. We gives them names like Opportunity and Curiosity and Voyager, and even if we're not always thinking about them, we wonder at the photos they take when they show us something human eyes have never seen before.
So, in order to commemorate Opportunity's long journey, I ended up writing a song for it. I'm by no means a professional composer, but I've played music for a long time, and sometimes I feel like it's the only good way to express a feeling. Come share this feeling with me.
Opportunity's Song
This is beautiful.
ReplyDelete