“My battery is low and it’s getting dark”

Image courtesy NASA/JPL/Cornell

I’ve been following the Mars rover Opportunity for a few years now, mostly through her Twitter feed. She and her twin Spirit landed on Mars in 2004, in a stunning feat of human ingenuity. Her job was to wheel around the craters and send us images of her new home planet. What was originally supposed to be a 90-day mission turned out so successfully that she kept sending back pictures for 15 years.

Last summer, she was engulfed in a months-long dust storm that obscured her solar panels, and her battery wasn’t able to recharge. She went silent, and after months of attempts to contact her, Opportunity’s mission was officially called this week.

Around the world, humans reacted with genuine sorrow, and I’ve been struck by the way that the scientists at NASA and the Jet Propulsion Laboratory have made Opportunity’s story so relatable. This is an inanimate golf-cart-sized construction of panels, wheels, cameras and computer chips, not the perfectly anthropomorphized Wall-E.

Some of the emotional response may be due to Opportunity’s new circumstances, a relatively small thing stranded alone in a vast unknown desert, forever. Maybe it’s a hopefulness, that this inorganic object could be brought back to life at a later date, that all is not lost. But I think a large part of it is in the way the scientists positioned her narrative. They created a persona for her, emphasized her heroism, and let her last words stand for themselves, and this was consistent from launch, through the entirety of the mission, to her final resting place.

This is a good lesson, not just for science writers trying to break through the white noise, but for writers in general. It’s a lesson in making your audience care, without being maudlin or manipulative. They’ve made me, and many others, want to know what will happen next. Thanks, Oppy.