This week, NASA said goodbye to Opportunity, a rover that roamed the surface of Mars for nearly 15 years before it was silenced by a planet-encompassing dust storm last summer.
Over the years, the rover hit a lot of milestones, including completing a marathon. Its engineers managed to keep it working through standard Mars hazards like brutal temperature swings and dust storms and as it coped with problems of memory loss. In the end, its mission lasted 5,352 Martian days, which is almost 60 times longer than the 90-day mission that it was originally expected to complete.
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Stop breadboarding and soldering – start making immediately! Adafruit’s Circuit Playground is jam-packed with LEDs, sensors, buttons, alligator clip pads and more. Build projects with Circuit Playground in a few minutes with the drag-and-drop MakeCode programming site, learn computer science using the CS Discoveries class on code.org, jump into CircuitPython to learn Python and hardware together, TinyGO, or even use the Arduino IDE. Circuit Playground Express is the newest and best Circuit Playground board, with support for CircuitPython, MakeCode, and Arduino. It has a powerful processor, 10 NeoPixels, mini speaker, InfraRed receive and transmit, two buttons, a switch, 14 alligator clip pads, and lots of sensors: capacitive touch, IR proximity, temperature, light, motion and sound. A whole wide world of electronics and coding is waiting for you, and it fits in the palm of your hand.
Have an amazing project to share? The Electronics Show and Tell is every Wednesday at 7pm ET! To join, head over to YouTube and check out the show’s live chat – we’ll post the link there.
