Good Night Oppy (Review)

[WillBrink]

The Mars rover Opportunity was asked to survive a 90 mission on Mars. She went on for 10 years more. Whether you're into science/space flight to Mars or not, you will enjoy this amazing documentary, that shows what can be accomplished when smart passionate people with a budget can accomplish, what humans are capable of when not wasting time on minutia. It's documentaries like that which trigger a passion for science in young people, so ANYONE with kids needs to watch that, although I guarantee all ages will enjoy Good Night Oppy. I hope they show this one in schools too, it will awaken dreams in young minds... It's a very well done documentary about a trip to another planet, and not science fiction but science reality. Gets my highest recommendation: A


https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tq8uDmgSkCg

[joedirt199]

Watched it as well. Hard not to get attached to the robots and feel the same sadness as the scientists working with them for so many years. Very good and informative.

[TehLlama]

Did I still cry at the end: yes.
Could it have been a fair bit better - yeah, but realistically for what it was, I feel like using music to link together a lot of story threads actually worked quite well.

I just always wish they let world class scientists actually talk science a little bit more, go into slightly more in-depth explanations of just how badly the solar panel AND battery performance drops off over time, and explain how much they had to really work the mass budget to surface to build in enough margin to actually make this possible, because they did some seriously impressive stuff to actually achieve the extended mission life goals that is worth that bit of extra explanation to highlight.

[SteyrAUG]

That was disappointing.

Loved the actual science, the challenge of putting two rovers on Mars and the exploration and photos they achieved.

Didn't care for the speculative science. I'm not 100% certain the proved irrefutable evidence of past water on Mars, but what they found is interesting. But it's a long way from declaring Mars had oceans and possibly life, etc.

Hated the climate change nonsense that seems to be required for every show about any environment. That a person in charge of a NASA project would comment "We need to understand how Mars lost it water and make sure we don't cause the same thing to happen here" is offensively ignorant. The two main contributors that likely would have cause Mars to lose any water it may have had are it's low mass and no plate tectonics.

We couldn't cause either of those things to happen on Earth and anyone working at Nasa in any capacity should understand that.

I also hated that half the show was spent with scientists and engineers acting like the two rovers were ET. It's ok it take pride in your engineering accomplishment, but it's not a puppy. Everyone at Nasa acting like children was more than a little annoying.

While not as egregious as the previous issues, I was also blown away by how casually they jeopardized both rovers first by driving one blind for days and then trying to navigate some seriously steep grades. I realize the 90 day mission was accomplished but you don't spend billions on a project like this and then just do whatever willy nilly, it shows a serious lack of respect for the people who ultimately pay for such exploration.

I'm glad they got an additional 10 years from Opportunity, but some of that is luck. Poorly thought out mission plans could have cut that in half and denied them the most important potential discovery that was made.

[TehLlama]

That was disappointing....
Hated the climate change nonsense that seems to be required for every show about any environment. That a person in charge of a NASA project would comment "We need to understand how Mars lost it water and make sure we don't cause the same thing to happen here" is offensively ignorant. The two main contributors that likely would have cause Mars to lose any water it may have had are it's low mass and no plate tectonics.

We couldn't cause either of those things to happen on Earth and anyone working at Nasa in any capacity should understand that..

I didn't realize just how much I've started just mentally tuning that stuff out, kinda like YouTube ads.

As far as driving the rover blind and pushing - at more depth, the real reason why is that if you're stuck in the middle of a sand dune, you're not going to get to do anything all that interesting soon anyway, and they'd previously had really good luck with just blindly pinning it and getting out of trouble in previous instances, so much so that it was a little bit of a de-facto plan. I don't strictly consider that disrespectful to taxpayers, in that the value proposition was honestly already met with getting a solid six months of data from the things (especially during a timeframe when Mars was eating 50% of the missions headed that way overall).

[SteyrAUG]

I didn't realize just how much I've started just mentally tuning that stuff out, kinda like YouTube ads.

With the advent of satellite TV and all the channels it launched during the 90s, we got a solid 20 years of PURE science and history channels and unfortunately for me that is where my expectation bar got set. I still bitch about Ice Road Truckers on the history channel and it's been that way for 15 years now. I don't even watch the history channel anymore, but it's still annoying.

I also think that anyone employed at Nasa should EXPLAIN why Mars lost any water it might have had vs. draw a climate change analogy and suggest it could happen on Earth (prior to the sun going red giant anyway). To do otherwise creates an entire generation of kids who are just that much more ignorant.



As far as driving the rover blind and pushing - at more depth, the real reason why is that if you're stuck in the middle of a sand dune, you're not going to get to do anything all that interesting soon anyway, and they'd previously had really good luck with just blindly pinning it and getting out of trouble in previous instances, so much so that it was a little bit of a de-facto plan. I don't strictly consider that disrespectful to taxpayers, in that the value proposition was honestly already met with getting a solid six months of data from the things (especially during a timeframe when Mars was eating 50% of the missions headed that way overall).

I still think it was kind of reckless. F-16 pilots aren't allowed to engage in anything remotely like that and what is the comparable cost? They had the damn thing stuck in the sand spinning it's wheels for 24 hours before anyone even noticed. It's a dumb way to scrub the entire thing. That had to be a bigger energy drain than simply powering up the camera every hour for 5 minutes.

My biggest problem is I actually care about all this stuff. Space exploration is one of the most important things we still do. When missions are executed carelessly and when everyone treats it like a Lifetime channel movie it annoys the crap out of me. How many people WANT to work in that field and these are the most qualified people? I seriously doubt it. Public interest and promotion are part of it, but it shouldn't eclipse the most important parts.

[TehLlama]

With the advent of satellite TV and all the channels it launched during the 90s, we got a solid 20 years of PURE science and history channels and unfortunately for me that is where my expectation bar got set. I still bitch about Ice Road Truckers on the history channel and it's been that way for 15 years now. I don't even watch the history channel anymore, but it's still annoying.

In so many ways it's more frustrating for me, because I'm in close with some of the Discovery executives who were in charge of science planning... I mean how are you meant to feel when you reach the VP level in charge of science programming for a network like Discovery, and then West Coast Derpy Motorcycles becomes the entire direction of programming for the next decade.


The fact that you're even asking that question already puts you into rarified intellectual circles... the frustrating part to me really is that so many kids get exactly as far as being gifted those factoids, and delivered right onto the leftward local maximum of the Dunning-Kruger curve, then told how brilliant they are. Sometimes it's really irritating for me working as a mentor for some of these kids because they literally can't conceive of having to re-evaluate information, and they frankly don't have the tools intellectually because they have been shortchanged so badly to the process education, let alone desire to actually evaluate those assumptions.