Beyond January 2019, if Opportunity still has not phoned home, the receivers on the DSN are always listening when Mars is in the field of view. “Anytime there is a deep space telescope on the DSN pointing toward Mars, we will hear or see the signal from the rover if it comes, even past January,” said MER Deputy Principal Investigator Ray Arvidson, of Washington University St. Louis.

At that point, however, it really will be a race against time. The mission’s history shows that good gusts of dust clearing winds have blown across Meridiani Planum through March, which is, arguably, the official end of the dust season, and there is a desire on the part of many team members to keep reaching out for Oppy until then. After that fall will be moving in and the team would need to begin preparing the rover for winter. That, however, is then.

In the meantime, if Opportunity is as dust-laden as many team members believe she is, the rover, after so many months in silent solitude, may well need an actively commanded electronic nudge in the weeks following the 45-day intensive outreach. Especially considering that from July through the southern summer solstice on October 16th the rover is most likely, taking on dust as Jennifer Herman, MER’s power team lead pointed out in the last MER Update.

“We have been discussing this in our team meetings and there is a feeling that the dust loading on the solar arrays might be a little too much for expectation of anything within 45 days,” said Arvidson.

Simply reviewed, as the mission’s history on Mars has shown and considering the intensity of the planet-encircling dust event (PEDE), Opportunity is likely in serious need of dust cleaning. Team members are hanging their hopes on the windy season they know is coming.

If the mission’s lucky star is still shining, Mars will produce the needed dust devils and wind gusts to whisk some of the recently accumulated layers of dust from the rover’s solar arrays and that could make all the difference in the world of MER. “I think we have a very good engineering case that our commanding attempts will have a higher probability of working then, rather than right now when the rover is dusty and probably not waking up,” said Staab.

Therein lies the rub, which, in essence, is at the crux of what caused so much consternation and confusion after NASA-JPL first announced the two-step plan by press release on August 30th. The winds will arrive during the second step of the two-step strategy, when the team members are slated to only be passively listening for Opportunity.

Social media twizzled and whirled with talk that NASA was going to pull the plug on the world’s beloved rover and that message became the buzz. “It is unfortunate that people thought the agency was trying to find an easy way to not do much to recover Opportunity,” said Richard Zurek, Chief Scientist of the Mars Program Office at JPL and MRO. “That is not the case,” he added, reiterating what he said in the last issue of The MER Update.

In fact, Thomas Zurbuchen, NASA's Associate Administrator for the Science Mission Directorate,who, along with Mars of course, holds the rover’s fate in his hands, showed his support on Twitter in early September when he posted a message that read in part: “Rest assured we are not giving up. We are listening and working to recover Oppy. The mission is funded through end of FY19.”

Said Callas at month’s end: “NASA continues to keep saying to me that they fully support the recovery of this rover. And they want us to do all we can to try to recover Opportunity.”