It’s never easy to say goodbye, even to a space robot

I asked Squyres whether the team had any more ideas for how to command the rover awake, in case their latest strategy doesn’t work. “No,” he said.

After that, the final call regarding Opportunity’s fate is up to NASA leadership. If the news is bad, the Opportunity team will join a grim club in space exploration: engineers and scientists who have said goodbye to spacecraft after years, sometimes decades, of effort and devotion. Some have known when the end would come, even deliberately planned for it. Others had no warning. In either case, letting go is painful.

The attempts to communicate, the wait, the uncertainty—these can be excruciating when the loss is unexpected, as Jim Spann, a chief scientist at NASA’s Marshall Space Flight Center, knows. In 2005, Spann was working on a spacecraft called IMAGE, or Imager for Magnetopause-to-Aurora Global Exploration, when it suddenly stopped talking to Earth.