The past year was an exciting one for the Red Planet: Opportunity and Curiosity passed major operational milestones, the InSight lander joined the robotic fleet on the surface, and big discoveries like a possible underground lake were announced. What does the coming year have in store for us?

1. #WakeUpOppy

January 24, 2019 marks the 15th anniversary of the Opportunity rover’s landing on Mars. With a primary mission length of only 90 martian days (“sols”), our little rover had wildly surpassed its warranty and all expectations by June of 2018, when it was slammed with the largest dust storm we’ve ever observed on Mars. On sol 5111 of its mission, contact with “Oppy” was lost when dust lofted by the storm blocked so much sun, day essentially became night. Since Opportunity is solar powered, the darkness meant power dropped to perilous levels, and (we think) the rover put itself into hibernation mode to keep itself alive. Even after the dust storm dissipated however, Opportunity didn’t phone home. Images from the High Resolution Imaging Science Experiment (HiRISE) camera in orbit of Mars showed that the solar panels appeared to be coated in dust—perhaps enough to prevent the batteries from charging back up.

Oppy—the tiny dot in the centre of the white square—as viewed by HiRISE on September 20, 2018, after the dust storm had substantially cleared. Nice, clean solar panels on the rovers are blue in HiRISE images, but there’s not much blue to be seen here, a sign that the panels were coated in dust when this image was taken. Image credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/University of Arizona

By now, this probably sounds like a bleak tale to you, and a sad fate for poor Oppy. But not all hope is lost! In previous martian years, we’ve gotten lucky with wind and dust devils coming by and cleaning off the solar panels of the rovers. We’re in that potential dust clearing period this martian year right now. Fingers around the world are crossed in the hopes that the winds are in our favour again this year.

Opportunity is the longest-lived and farthest-driven rover beyond Earth. On this journey, it has discovered evidence of ancient watery environments that could have been hospitable to life as we know it, taught us about the wind, and found a host of meteorites, just to name a few. But there are still more martian mysteries to be unlocked. Not too long before contact was lost, the rover began driving down a feature called Perseverance Valley, potentially carved by flowing water in the ancient past. More data from the ground will help us better understand this interesting feature and how it formed, adding to the greater picture of the history of water on Mars.

If you’d like to share your support for Oppy, you can send a postcard to the rover and its team through the NASA website, and/or tweet your love with the hashtag #WakeUpOppy!

2. Monitoring for marsquakes

NASA’s InSight lander arrived on Mars in late November 2018. Since then, it’s been doing a series of instrument checkouts to make sure everything is functioning properly after its 6-month interplanetary journey. On December 19th, the lander used its robotic arm to gently place a seismometer onto the martian surface. Once the seismometer is levelled out, it will be ready to collect data. The goal for this instrument is to determine whether Mars experiences “marsquakes”—equivalent to earthquakes here at home. This will teach us about Mars’ interior structure, as well as the rate at which meteorites are striking the surface (since those impacts cause seismic shaking, like hitting a bell with a mallet). We’ve seen hundreds of new impact craters form on Mars over the past couple of decades, so we know stuff manages to slam into the planet on a regular basis.

Stay tuned in 2019 for the first possible mars-shaking results!

A fish-eye view of NASA’s InSight lander deploying its first instrument onto the surface of Mars. InSight’s robotic arm placed the seismometer on Dec. 19, 2018, around the time of dusk on Mars. These images were taken by the Instrument Context Camera (ICC), a fish-eye camera under the spacecraft’s deck. The dark specks are dust particles on the camera’s protective lens cover, kicked up during landing. Eventually this cover will be opened and the images will be speck-free. Image credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech

3. Hunting for heat

In addition to its seismometer, InSight will be deploying another new instrument on—or more accurately, in—Mars. The German-built Heat Flow and Physical Properties Probe, or HP^3, will hammer itself 5 metres (16 feet) into the martian subsurface to measure the heat flow coming from within the planet. Taking the internal temperature will tell us about how Mars—and by proxy, the other rocky planets in our Solar System—formed, its interior structure, and whether there is any remnant geologic activity deep within Mars today.

Artist’s rendition of the InSight lander on the martian surface with the heat probe instrumentation labelled. Image credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech

For more on the heat probe and the mole that will hammer it into the subsurface, I will refer you to this fantastically hilarious and informative comic from The Oatmeal. I can only dream to ever describe a space mission as well as Matthew Inman has there.

4. Clays for Curiosity

After having spent all of 2018 studying a hematite-rich feature called the Vera Rubin Ridge (named after the astronomer who discovered dark matter), Curiosity will be moving into a new unit in 2019. This new, as-of-yet-unnamed area appears to be rich in clays based on data taken from orbit. It’s also the last zone that was specifically targeted when picking Gale Crater as the landing site for Curiosity, so it will be a chance to ground truth the hypotheses scientists had for this area based on satellite data. Clays are always of interest on Mars because their formation typically involves water based on what we know about clays on Earth. Gale Crater hosted a lake with conditions hospitable to life as we know it over 3 billion years ago. The layers of clays that make up a portion of Mount Sharp within Gale are the remnants of that lake, left behind when the water evaporated away. Studying these clays tells us about the composition of that lake and what the environment was like on Mars at the time.

Curiosity snapped this “selfie” atop Vera Rubin Ridge in January 2018. The pinkish peak behind its mast is Mount Sharp, the layered mountain that the rover is investigating within Gale Crater. Vera Rubin Ridge lies within the foothills at its base. Credits: NASA/JPL-Caltech/MSSS

5. Meanwhile, on Earth…

Lots of things are happening here on Earth in 2019 to pave the way for more martian goodness. Instruments for NASA’s Mars 2020 rover will be undergoing final testing and integration steps to prepare for launch next year. In the 2019 school year, kids will have the chance to help name this rover, so get your creative caps on now. Meanwhile, the European Space Agency and China also plan to launch rovers to Mars in 2020, so instrument testing and integration will be going on for those in 2019 as well. SpaceX is also aiming to launch a test of a mini-BFR (Big Falcon Rocket) this year, prepping for their own Mars mission plans.

2019 won’t just be a big year on Mars, but also a big year for working toward the future for the Red Planet. Let’s keep that momentum going!