The Opportunity rover's final message to Earth was my battery is low and it is getting dark
The Opportunity rover did not actually transmit the words "my battery is low and it is getting dark"; this phrase was a popular poetic paraphrase created by a journalist to describe its final technical data dump.
Judged against fact-checker rulings and reference works: claims of this kind are settled by the fact-checking record, not journal abstracts.
Snopes: Was a Mars Rover's Final Message to NASA 'My Battery Is Low and .... Snopes. https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/opportunity-rovers-final-words/
Fact-checker ruling: Mostly False
2 recorded entries grouped as this source
snopes.com: Was a Mars Rover's Final Message to NASA 'My Battery Is Low and It's Getting Dark?' | Snopes.com. snopes.com. https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/opportunity-rovers-final-words/
Fact-checker ruling: reviewed
See more details
science.nasa.gov: Opportunity's Last Message - NASA Science. science.nasa.gov. https://science.nasa.gov/photojournal/opportunitys-last-message/
Shows the actual last data was an incomplete image and data dump, not text.
nasa.gov: NASA's Record-Setting Opportunity Rover Mission on Mars Comes to End - NASA. nasa.gov. https://www.nasa.gov/news-release/nasas-record-setting-opportunity-rover-mission-on-mars-comes-to-end/
States the final communication was a normal transmission, not the quoted sentence.
space.stackexchange.com: What was the last message Opportunity sent?. space.stackexchange.com. https://space.stackexchange.com/questions/34243/what-was-the-last-message-opportunity-sent
Explains the phrase is a human interpretation of diagnostics from a single tweet.
The paper trail · every fact has a biography
Challenge the receipt
Citation formatting by citeproc-js (Frank Bennett) and the Citation Style Language project. Source and licenses.
Terms · Privacy · How verdicts work · Dispute this receipt