The Opportunity rover has survived Martian hell for 15 years. Here's how.

A dust storm the size of North America has smothered NASA's Opportunity rover for the past week, shrouding much of the red planet in darkness and depriving the robot's solar panels of light. 

Opportunity's battery power has dropped so low that it's now in a sleep mode and unable to send information back to Earth.

"It's gotten so bad she's not talking to us," Bill Nelson, chief of the Opportunity mission's engineering team at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, said in an interview. 

SEE ALSO: The Opportunity rover is caught in a huge dust storm on Mars, but NASA remains hopeful

"It’s a bit scary — we like to hear from our rover." Read more...

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