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Opportunity
機遇號
Remembering a robot
銘記機器人
Opportunity, a rover on Mars whose time there exceeded all expectations, was declared lost on February 12th
“機遇號”火星探測器使用時間超過預期，于2月12日宣布失去聯系
It travelled more than 500m kilometres simply as a passenger, sleeping dreamless, vacuum-packed. The five-and-a-half-month voyage was devoid of all interest until the very end, when the spacecraft lost 20,000kph of its velocity in just over six minutes as it plunged through an alien sky to the desert below. Parachutes spread and airbags deployed. The package bounced, rolled and came to rest.
“機遇號”是一位無需睡眠、真空包裝的游客，旅行了超5億公里的路程。五個半月的路程未引起什么波瀾，直到最后，“機遇號”在6分鐘多一點的時間里失去了2萬公里每小時的速度，從火星天空墜入地下沙漠。降落傘打開，安全氣囊就位。包裹了安全氣囊的“機遇號”在滾落、彈起后，就永遠地休息了。
Opportunity still had 45km to go.
“機遇號”還有45公里要走
Four hours after landing on January 25th 2004, it opened its eyes. Its makers, back on Earth, looked through them at a landing site as perfect as they could have wished for. Opportunity’s landing on Meridiani Planum, a little south of the Martian equator, had not been a particularly precise affair—it could have come down anywhere in an ellipse some 100km long and 18km wide. But by chance the spot where it had ended up, about 25km from the centre of the target, was inside a small crater dug out by a meteorite impact. On the side of that crater the scientists saw straight away the distinctive strata of sedimentary rock. Nothing of the sort had ever before been seen beyond the Earth. It was exactly the type of thing the robot had been sent to find.
2004年1月25日，“機遇號”著陸4小時后，睜開了眼。而地球上的制造者通過“機遇號”，完美地如期看到了著陸點?！皺C遇號”降落在火星赤道以南一點的梅里迪亞尼平原上，降落點并不能精準把控，可能降落在長約100公里、寬約18公里的橢圓里的任何地方。但巧的是，在距離目標中心約25公里的地方，隕石撞出了一個小隕石坑。在隕石坑一側，科學家們可以直接看到獨特的沉積巖地層。在地球之外，這是第一次見到這種物質。這正是派“機遇號”去尋找的物質。
Opportunity was officially MER-B, the second of the two rovers of the Mars Exploration Rover programme; MER-A, Spirit, had landed a few weeks earlier in the great Gusev Crater, almost half the planet away. Unofficially, it was Oppy, and often a she. The two rovers’ missions were due to last 90 sols—a sol being the 24 hours and 40 minutes it takes Mars to turn on its axis. Faced with that time limit, Opportunity’s minders were thrilled not to have to spend any of those precious sols just looking for interesting rocks.
“機遇號”正式命名為MER-B，是火星探測漫游者計劃的兩輛漫游車中的第二輛；MER-A“勇氣號”幾周前降落在幾乎半個地球之外的古謝夫大坑。非正式來講，“勇氣號”曾叫做Oppy，而且常被稱為她。這兩輛火星車預計持續90個火星日——一個火星日是指火星自轉一周所需24小時40分鐘。面對這個時間限制，“機遇號”的保管員們很興奮，因為他們不用再花寶貴的火星日去尋找吸引人的巖石了。
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