https://motherboard.vice.com/en_us/article/kzkk4z/nasas-opportunity-rover-is-battling-for-its-life-in-an-epic-martian-dust-storm > NASA’s Opportunity rover, which landed on Mars in 2004, is the endurance champion of interplanetary explorers. Over the past 14 years, it has trundled across some 30 miles of Mars’ equatorial Meridiani Planum region—by far the longest distance traveled on an alien world—and has outlived its planned mission length 56 times over. > But Opportunity is now battling a potentially fatal challenge, in the aptly named Perseverance Valley. For the past few weeks, the rover has become enveloped by a gigantic dust storm. Stretching out over an area the size of North America and Russia combined, it is one of the most intense storms ever observed on Mars, and Opportunity is right in the center of it. (The Curiosity rover is fine and has avoided the worst of the storm.)