NASA begins sending new calls to Opportunity in effort to wake the Mars rover

It's been seven months since NASA last made contact with the Opportunity rover – but, the team isn't ready to give up hope just yet. The rover celebrated a bittersweet 15th anniversary on Mars last week as it remains silent after a dust storm that blanketed the red planet back in June. Engineers on the Opportunity team say they're now trying out a new set of commands in attempt to wake up the robotic explorer over the next few weeks. Opportunity landed on Jan. 24, 2004, and logged more than 28 miles (45 kilometers) before falling silent during a global dust storm June 2018. There was so much dust in the Martian atmosphere that sunlight could not reach Opportunity's solar panels for power generation The new commands are an effort to coax the rover back into operation and address the low-likelihood events that may have happened in the wake of the storm, preventing it from sending messages back to Earth, NASA says.