“It appears to show little change in Opportunity’s brightness, although Alfred relays that you can’t say that absolutely without doing some calculations, because of the different light and viewing conditions,” said Arvidson. “Visually however nothing seems to have changed in the scene. Even the delicate wind streaks have not changed. So, if the windy season has begun, it doesn’t seem to have impacted Perseverance Valley or Opportunity yet.”

Given that the HiRISE images are taken from an altitude that varies from 200 to 400 kilometers (about 125 to 250 miles) above Mars, these orbital images do not have the resolution that enable the team, or anyone for that matter, to actually see Opportunity close up or detect how much dust may be coating her solar arrays, or even a reliable view of the amount of dust on the surface.

“The HiRISE images can only tell us if something major happened, so Opportunity could have gotten a little bit of dust cleaning and we just can’t see it yet at this spatial scale,” Staab noted. “The image could also be telling us that we’re just at the beginning of the time of year when the winds should pick up and it could be the fact that we don’t see any major changes is a good thing.”

This much is certain: the new HiRISE image doesn’t indicate that a major wind event has occurred in Perseverance or Endeavour yet. “We really are going to be looking for major changes,” said Staab. “If, when we see those and we still haven’t heard from the vehicle, that, I think, would be the most concerning scenario that could happen.”

The science team meetings and the onset of the dust-cleaning season have buoyed the MER team’s inherent optimism. Still, “it’s been tough,” said Fraeman. “It’s easy to feel that with every passing day we haven’t heard from Opportunity, that something else is more seriously wrong, and that it’s going to be extremely difficult to recover the rover. We’re trying to be realistic. We really want to get the vehicle back, but we understand that MER is an old mission, and Opportunity is an old rover,” she said.

At the same time, the science team knows and honors the challenge that the MER ops engineers are confronting. “We definitely give a shout out to the engineering team. If Opportunity is recoverable, we will recover this rover, I have no doubt in my mind that the engineering team will be able to do that.”