Opportunity is quite a character. I’m talking about the star of Ryan White’s crowd-pleasing, Oscar-tipped documentary Good Night Oppy: a Nasa-engineered rover sent on a 90-day mission to Mars in 2003 that surprisingly stretched to 15 years.
Opportunity, or Oppy as some affectionately call her for short, is a melange of wheels, wires, antennas and solar panels that come together with traits familiar to humans. She has a neck that looks retrofitted from a kitchen sink drainpipe. And her head has cameras spread horizontally in binocular formation like eyes. And when the rover – in an early scene from Good Night Oppy – halts before what she assumes to be a Martian obstruction but turns out to be her own shadow, we can’t help but attribute a comical personality to her.
