Worse, the storm is “just days away from meeting the classification of a planet-encircling dust event,” Rich Zurek, the Mars Program Office Chief Scientist at JPL, announced at the teleconference. Once it goes full-circle, it will be only the third such dust storm to achieve that feat in the 20 years that NASA’s Mars Exploration Program has been monitoring the Red Planet, he pointed out.

Braving the raining dust and aggressive little gusts of wind, Opportunity, by most all accounts, is facing her greatest life-or-death challenge after being pummeled with dust for nearly two weeks. Members of the MER ops team, many of who have devoted a significant percentage of their lives to the care and feeding of this robot, are right there with Opportunity in spirit.

“This storm is a big deal,” Callas underscored. “It is concerning for the team. There is a strong bond with the rover, a tight emotional, anthropomorphized bond.”

Together, the robot and her human colleagues have been pioneering a distinctive, now legendary kind of human exploration. As a result, this human-robot bond probably goes deeper than even some of the scientists and engineers on the team ever dared suspect it could – until now perhaps, as their record-setting, career-making, lovable little robot field geologist clings to life.

A rover hero like no other, a marvel of a machine, a testament to American engineering, Opportunity is the longest-lived robot on another planet. She has been roving over Martian hills and through Martian dales on an expedition that’s ventured across the Martian surface on for 14 years, six months and counting, more than 50 times longer than the originally planned 90-sol tour. Giving up now is just not in the DNA of this team.

The brutal below freezing temperatures of the planet with no sunshine shining is the primary threat to Opportunity in the short term. Nighttime temperatures on Mars can drop to -96 degrees Celsius (-140 degrees Fahrenheit).The Martian cold is believed, in part at least, to have resulted in the loss of Spirit, back in 2010. Opportunity's twin had become stuck in along the edge of a shallow, small sand-filled crater and was unable to free herself before winter set in.

Over the long term, assuming the robot survives this massive storm, dust will be the main concern. But given the rover’s location in Perseverance Valley, there’s a good chance winds that blow up from the floor of Endeavour below “will help clean Opportunity’s solar arrays,” Zurek suggested.

Consider this thought experiment: how long could a human explorer caught up in this storm survive in the field?