Last night, NASA reached out one final time to the Opportunity rover on Mars, hoping the golf-cart-sized machine would phone home with good news. Since June, the robot has been unresponsive, likely because a planet-wide sandstorm coated its solar panels in dust. NASA has pinged it over 1,000 times in those gloomy eight months, to no avail. Last night's attempt was no exception: NASA has announced that Opportunity is officially dead. "I was there yesterday and I was there with the team as these commands went out into the deep sky," said NASA associate administrator Thomas Zurbuchen in a briefing this morning, titled A Lifetime of Opportunity.