Opportunity is DEAD: NASA confirms its 15-year-old Mars rover failed to wake up

Roughly eight months after it fell silent during a planet-wide Martian dust storm, and just weeks after celebrating its 15th anniversary on the red planet, NASA is finally saying goodbye to the Opportunity rover. The space agency has made hundreds of attempts to contact the rover since it powered down back in June, when dark skies prevented its solar battery from charging. In a last-ditch effort, NASA sent out a final set of commands on Tuesday in hopes it might finally respond. But once again, their calls were met only with silence. NASA confirmed the grim news in a press conference Wednesday afternoon, where it officially bade farewell to the long-running Mars exploration mission. With the death of the Opportunity rover also comes the end of NASA's Mars Exploration Rovers program, which launched from Cape Canaveral in July 2003 with the twin robots, Spirit and Opportunity.