NASA announced Feb. 13 that it was ending efforts to restore contact with the Opportunity Mars rover, bringing its mission to an end more than 15 years after it landed on the planet.

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Jeff Foust has more than a decade of experience writing about space policy, entrepreneurial ventures and regulatory affairs. In 2001, he established spacetoday.net to aggregate and summarize the day's space-related news stories. In 2003, he started The...