Mars Rover News 2015: NASA's Opportunity Rover Still Roaming Mars After 11 Years

Long after its warranties have expired, the National Aeronautics and Space Administration's Opportunity rover is still going strong as it celebrated its 11th year on Mars last week.

The robot's handlers marked the occasion with a gorgeous panoramic photo that Opportunity took while it was at the summit of Cape Tribulation, Space.com confirmed.

NASA then released a mosaic of the photos that mission team members combined to mark the Opportunity rover's 11th year anniversary last Thursday.

Opportunity held its robotic arm so that a small American flag printed on the rover would be visible in the photos, NASA officials said.

"The flag is printed on the aluminum cable guard of the rover's rock abrasion tool, which is used for grinding away weathered rock surfaces to expose fresh interior material for examination. The flag is intended as a memorial to victims of the Sept. 11, 2001 attacks on the World Trade Center in New York," NASA officials wrote in a description of the image.

"The aluminum used for the cable guard was recovered from the site of the twin towers in the weeks following the attacks. Workers at Honeybee Robotics in lower Manhattan, less than a mile from the World Trade Center, were making the rock abrasion tool for Opportunity and NASA's twin Mars Exploration Rover, Spirit, in September 2001," they added.

But Opportunity isn't celebrating the anniversary atop Cape Tribulation, which the rover already left on Jan. 17 to head for a spot mission scientists dubbed Marathon Valley.

Its 11 years of wandering enabled the Opportunity rover to establish a record as a vehicle that has traveled the farthest distance on the surface of another world than any other vehicle, beating the former Soviet Union's remote-controlled Lunokhod 2 rover, which racked up 39 kilometers on the moon in 1973.

While Opportunity is still a highly capable machine, the golf-cart-size rover is showing some signs of aging, NASA said.

Its robotic arm is a bit arthritic, for example, and Opportunity recently began having issues with its flash memory — the kind that can store data even when the power is off.

Mission team members are testing out some potential software fixes for the memory problem, NASA assured.

Opportunity landed on Mars on Jan. 24, 2004, a few weeks after its twin, Spirit, made its debut on the Red Planet. The two rovers were tasked with a three-month mission to look for signs of past water activity on Earth's closest planet.

The American space agency said both rovers were able to find "plenty of evidence" and kept on going until Spirit stopped communicating with Earth in 2010. It was declared "dead" in 2011.

But Opportunity still marches on, exploring the rim of Endeavour Crater, a 22-kilometer wide surface feature of Mars, since August 2011. The rover crested a rise on the rim known as Cape Tribulation earlier this month.