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On 13 February 2019, NASA announced that the mission of a robotic rover named Opportunity had come to an end after the device had spent 15 years exploring the surface of Mars: As the online world mourned the loss of the famous Martian explorer, many social media users started sharing a quote that supposedly constituted Oppy's final transmission to NASA: My battery is low and it’s getting dark. This quote quickly made its way around the Internet, shared by celebrities, reporters, and social media influencers. Some people also created tributes to Opportunity that featured the rover's alleged final transmission: Although many individuals and news outlets cited these words as if they constituted a verbatim reproduction of Opportunity's final transmission, the phrase was not a literal reproduction of the robotic rover's last statement. The quote originated with a Twitter thread about Oppy's demise by posted by KPCC science reporter Jacob Margolis. At one point, Margolis said the rover's final transmission basically translated as my battery is low and it's getting dark: This quote quickly escaped the context of Margolis' Twitter thread, however, and started to circulate as if he were relaying a verbatim message from the Mars rover. On 16 February 2019, Margolis published an article on The LAist website explaining how his words came to be taken out of context: When NASA announced the completion of Opportunity's mission in February 2019, the Mars rover hadn't communicated with the space agency since the previous June. The solar-powered Opportunity was low on power when one of the largest dust storms observed on Mars engulfed the planet and, essentially, turned day into night, as the Planetary Society wrote: Oppy sent its final message from the surface of Mars on 10 June 2018: NASA attempted to communicate with Opportunity many times after the storm passed, but the rover never responded:
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