‘It’s getting dark’: ‘Good Night Oppy’ recounts the sudden death of a Mars rover

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In the opening scenes of the new film “Good Night Oppy,” the Opportunity rover rolls along through Perseverance Valley on Mars in June 2018, as “Roam” by The B-52s fills the room at mission control.

The peppy tune was the rover’s wake-up song, played at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California. In the same way NASA has used a song to wake up astronauts each day they spend in space since the 1960s, the Opportunity rover team began their daily shifts with a song that set the mood for “Oppy’s” journey.

But a storm brewing on the horizon changed everything.

The documentary film "Good Night Oppy" follows the Mars Opportunity rover, which turned what NASA expected to be a 90-day mission into 15 years of exploration on the red planet.

Oppy had weathered dust storms before, along with solar flares, sand traps, cosmic rays, near collisions and harsh Martian winters for more than a decade while exploring the red planet. In 2018, however, her team was able to recognize the signs of “gray hairs” — a failing memory, the desire to nap, arthritis in the robotic arm.

Mission team members still thought of her as their lucky rover, though — invincible. After all, Oppy was designed for a 90-day mission, but she had exceeded all expectations and outlived her twin sister, Spirit, by some seven years.

This storm was different. It rapidly grew in size, encircling the planet and blocking out the sun.

The solar-powered rover’s last message to mission control translated to this: “My battery is low and it’s getting dark.”

This chapter is just the beginning of the documentary, available to stream on Amazon Prime on November 23. The film traces the journey of the twin rovers and the people who dedicated their lives to them from concept to that last transmission.

The film shines a light on the hope of space exploration and captures the emotional attachment between humans and the robotic ambassadors that explore on our behalf.

Director Ryan White has woven together decades of footage from the NASA vaults with photorealistic effects and animation from Industrial Light & Magic, the famed visual effects company founded by George Lucas, and narration from actor Angela Bassett. The documentary places the viewer on Mars along with the two rovers as they roam on opposite sides of the red planet.

“Even though the spacecraft was robotic, the mission was human,” said Doug Ellison, engineering camera team lead for the Curiosity Rover at JPL, who also worked on Opportunity’s mission.

Twin robots

As NASA engineers built and tested the twin rovers in the early 2000s, they quickly realized the robots couldn’t be more different. Spirit was the headstrong drama queen while Opportunity was the overachiever, according to team members. Spirit was stubborn and struggled through the same tests that Opportunity breezed through. Their personalities seemed as human as their design.

The rovers were built to search for past evidence of water on Mars. Both launched in 2003 inside protective shells aboard Delta rockets and landed in 2004 on opposite sides of the red planet. The dual mission’s first 90 days came and went, and the JPL team realized the two rovers were ready for more adventure.

This image is a cropped version of the last 360-degree panorama taken by the Opportunity rover's panoramic camera from May 13 through June 10, 2018. The view is presented in false color to make some differences between materials easier to see.

Are those Martian blueberries? These tiny spherules pepper the sandy surface in this 3-centimeter (1.2-inch) square view of the Martian surface. Opportunity took this image while the target was shadowed by the rover's instrument arm.

From its perch high on a ridge, Opportunity recorded this image of a Martian dust devil twisting through the valley below. Just as on Earth, a dust devil is created by a rising, rotating column of hot air. When the column whirls fast enough, it picks up tiny grains of dust from the ground, making the vortex visible.

While traversing on and around the ancient volcanic feature called Home Plate, Spirit took many images of finely layered and more frothy looking volcanic rocks.

Opportunity photographed its tracks in the soft sand between the Endurance and Victoria craters on the Meridiani Plains.

More blueberries! Opportunity took this photo in 2004 of a rock called "Last Chance." The spherules embedded in the rock reminded the researchers of berries in muffins. The textures in the rock actually helped researchers determine that Mars had wet environmental conditions in the past.

Oppy's panoramic camera gathered this mosaic in 2014 of Wdowiak Ridge, as well as the rover's tracks to the right. This is about 70 degrees from north/northwest to east/northeast, showing the 500-feet ridge that rises 40 feet tall.

The rover took a selfie to show how much dust it had accumulated in 2011 before the windy season helped knock some of it off.

Sometimes, when Opportunity's solar power was limited, it would stop between treks to different features on Mars. This 2010 photo of its tracks on the surface show it "hopping from lily pad to lily pad."

The Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter took this photo of Victoria Crater, about a half-mile in diameter. It was Opportunity's home for 14 of the first 46 months it spent on Mars.

Opportunity's panoramic camera took this photo of outcrop rocks that it encountered on its journey in 2005. Cracks and other features are obvious. The two holes visible were drilled by the rover to expose the underlying material.

A shadow selfie. On July 26, 2004, the rover took this photo commemorating its 90 days on Mars -- the amount of time the mission was supposed to last. Instead, it continued for 15 years.

Opportunity made an impact. A panoramic image shows the heat shield impact site when it landed in 2004.

This iron meteorite was the first meteorite of any type ever found on another planet. The basketball-sized meteorite is rich in iron and nickel, and Opportunity found it in 2005.

Endurance Crater and its tendrils of sand presented a beautiful photo chance for the rover in 2004. Mars is full of dunes, and this is just one example Opportunity encountered.

These pointy features were called "Razorback." They're only a few centimeters tall, but the chunks of rock were found sticking up at the edge of flat rocks in Endurance Crater. They may have formed when fluids moved through rock fractures.

In 2010, Opportunity took this panorama of the eastward horizon view of Endeavour Crater's rim.

The Mars Spirit rover was Opportunity's twin, and it's mission ended in 2011. Both rovers featured a piece of metal with the American flag on the side. They are made of aluminum recovered from the site of the World Trade Center towers in New York City.

These two views from NASA's Curiosity rover -- from June 7, left, and June 10 2018 -- show how dust increased over three days from a major Martian dust storm that became planet-encircling on June 20, 2018. Opportunity was stranded in the middle of the storm and wasn't heard from afterward.

NASA's Opportunity rover appears as a blip in the center of this square. This image taken by HiRISE, a high-resolution camera on board NASA's Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter, showed the dust storm over Perseverance Valley had substantially cleared.

Exploring Mars: 15 years of Opportunity on Mars

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Together, Spirit and Opportunity’s findings would rewrite the textbooks with new information about the red planet and its intriguing, watery past — and they both got into all sorts of trouble in between discoveries, like getting stuck in the sand and nearly careening down the sides of steep craters.

The bonds between team members and the rovers quickly deepened, despite the vast distance between Earth and Mars — making it all the more difficult when Spirit’s journey ended in 2011 and Opportunity fell silent in 2018. There was hope for both rovers to “wake up” until the bitter end.

“The way that the (Opportunity) mission ended was very sudden,” Ellison told CNN. “We had a very happy and healthy rover one week, and then this dust storm came along and took it all away. … You can call it a death in the family. It was very sudden, it was very traumatic. And getting to revisit it was really kind of emotionally rewarding.”

Thousands of people had worked on every aspect of the rovers, bringing them to life and keeping them rolling on Mars longer than anyone expected.

“What we’re really saying goodbye to is the teamwork that is focused through this robot and getting to work with a whole bunch of amazing people,” Ellison said.

Bringing ‘Oppy’ to life

The creative process behind the film began in March 2020 on the eve of the pandemic.

A self-professed “space geek,” White grew up in the 1980s and followed space missions. The project became his “lifesaver, getting to work on something so joyful during such a dark time,” he said.

Industrial Light & Magic took up the task of bringing Mars to life in a way that had never been seen on film before. Shot by shot, ILM team members worked with NASA to confirm what they depicted was accurate to the rovers’ experience.

The end result is as close as viewers may get to standing on the surface of Mars, with camera angles that feel like they were filmed on the red planet itself.

“ILM really taught us that you can do that within the constraints of reality: through lensing, and lighting, and through the angle on the robot’s cameras, which were her eyes,” White said.

A mission team member inspects the NASA Opportunity rover. The team grew emotionally attached to the robotic Mars explorer and its twin, Spirit.

Spirit and Oppy’s missions have ended, but Mars exploration continues today through next-generation rovers like Curiosity and Perseverance. The latter launched in July 2020 as White was working on the documentary.

The first Martian samples collected by Perseverance will make their way to Earth in the 2030s, and may contain evidence of life — if it ever existed on the red planet.

“All of these missions, as a cadence, are the precursor for sending humans there to carry on that adventure in the future,” Ellison said. “I hope that the next generation of engineers and explorers, people like my little 4-year-old girl, can see documentaries like this and go, ‘I want to do some of that, too. I want to be a part of an adventure like that.’”

Add to queue: More on Mars

Watch: “The Mars Generation” (2017)

Aspiring teenage astronauts explore the curriculum at NASA’s Space Camp in Huntsville, Alabama, as they chase dreams of traveling to Mars one day. Experts also weigh in on NASA’s history and future and the practicality of colonizing another planet, revealing the first human journey to Mars is closer than you might think.

Watch: “The Martian” (2015)

Based on the novel by Andy Weir, the optimistic sci-fi film by Ridley Scott follows a stranded astronaut who must find clever ways to survive on barren Mars with only a few supplies and no way to contact Earth.

Watch: “The Expanse” (2015-2022)

Set in a future in which much of the solar system has been colonized by humanity, the six-season television series (and a book series of nine novels by James S.A. Corey) follows a hardened detective and a rogue ship’s captain who investigate the case of a missing young woman. Racing across the planets, they uncover secrets about their unusual living circumstances.

Read: “Roving Mars: Spirit, Opportunity and the Exploration of the Red Planet” (2005)

Steven Squyres, mission manager for the Mars Exploration Rover Project, shares the story behind the landing of the twin rovers in 2004. With the many setbacks in the mission’s early start, and the race against the clock to finish building the two rovers before launch, Squyres gives readers a front-row seat and his expert insights on the rovers’ first findings.

Watch: “Apollo 11: First Steps Edition” (2019)

Released 50 years after NASA’s Apollo 11 mission, this critically acclaimed documentary breaks down the final moments of preparation in 1969 leading up to the landing of the first human on the moon. With current Artemis missions set to land the first woman and first person of color on the moon in the coming decade, NASA hopes further lunar discovery will eventually lead to the first human setting foot on Mars, making the findings from the historic Apollo 11 mission more important than ever.

Taylor Nicioli contributed to this story.

Top image: Visual effects artists working on the film studied how Martian sand moves in the wind, how light diffuses through the thin Martian atmosphere, and what it looks like on the planet’s surface at sunrise and sunset.

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