NASA Sets a Grim Deadline for Saving a Beloved Mars Rover

For weeks, Michael Staab has slept with his cell phone on his nightstand, its ringer set to the highest volume, waiting for a call from Mars.

Staab, an engineer at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL), in California, is leading the recovery effort for one of the agency’s Mars rovers, Opportunity. The nearly 15-year-old rover went silent in mid-June as a record-breaking dust storm swept across the planet. As the atmosphere swelled with dust, sunlight couldn’t reach the rocky valley in Mars’s southern hemisphere where Opportunity resides. The solar-powered rover couldn’t charge its batteries in the stormy darkness, so it slipped into a quiet sleep.

Engineers at JPL have spent the summer trying to wake it up. The Deep Space Network, a collection of massive radio antennas that communicates with spacecraft throughout the solar system, spends hours a day listening to Mars. The engineers use the network to relay commands to the rover, instructing it to send back a beep. In the past several weeks, the dust storm has abated and the skies have begun