A new educational movie just came out! It is called “Good Night Oppy.” I had the privilege to watch this movie before it came out on Nov. 4 in theaters and Amazon Prime! “Good Night Oppy” is one of the most exciting educational films I have ever seen. The documentary does a great job of explaining and showing the process of building, launching, and controlling the rovers, as well as showing us the whole journey of Oppy.
You might be wondering, what is Oppy? Oppy is short for Opportunity. On July 7, 2003, NASA launched twin rovers, Spirit and Opportunity. Oppy and Spirit were only supposed to spend 90 sols on Mars. What is a sol? Sol means sun, so 90 sols is equal to approximately 90 days. What is surprising is that Spirit was able to provide feedback and information to NASA until May 25, 2011, which is 2,266 Earth days. Meanwhile Oppy lasted until June 10, 2018! That is about a whopping 15 years! I mean, people weren’t even expecting Spirit and Oppy to even LAND and work correctly once on Mars! NASA calls Mars a “Spacecraft Graveyard” because there are many dead rovers on it due to failed landing attempts by different countries.
I completely loved this film. I learned the NASA engineers had only a small window of time to build and test the rovers. It took them a very long time to get signoff from NASA to launch, and a long time for approval to even start building! I liked watching them build the rovers and the landing process. It was very complicated, but awesome!
One more thing I found interesting was that it takes 7 to 10 minutes to send a command to the rover from Earth. Also, the engineers treat them like their son or daughter because in the end, they spent a lot of time developing them, and Spirit and Oppy are very cute!
The movie debuted on Amazon Prime on Nov. 13. I absolutely loved the movie and I have a feeling you will, too! Even if you think space stuff is boring, they do an awesome job at keeping the film fun and entertaining while showing how everything worked and what happened. You should definitely watch “Good Night Oppy.” Trust me, it will be totally worth it!
