Ode to Oppy

Play: Ode to Oppy

Shadow and Tracks of Opportunity Rover on Martian Slope

Image Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech

https://www.nasa.gov/image-feature/jpl/pia20328/opportunitys-shadow-and-tracks-on-martian-slope

Twine is not a user-friendly platform. It is supposed to allow for text enriching, adding audio, and visual elements, etc. however, after hours of attempts, I concluded, that either I am broken completely as a programmer, or Twine was broken. I am also not much of a poet at all. I do enjoy coming up with branching narratives, but this was supposed to be a poem adaptation, not a narrative created out of whole-cloth. All my advantages were ruthlessly removed.

About the time I learned about all of this, one of my favorite robots bit the dust. Opportunity was declared dead, unrecoverable. The Curiosity rover twitter account posted a memorial poem, and, as I loved Oppy, I decided to take that 8-line, 2 stanza poem, and adapt it while trying to maintain a poetic nature.

Oppy was known not only for its ridiculous amount of science, but also its tenacity to operation. It functioned for far longer than planned. In a similar way, the original poem was 8 lines, and it became something far longer. It has a meandering path and attempts to drive home the feeling of never fading away…until suddenly, what we had hoped would never end, ends.

I had hoped and planned on adding audio and visual elements to this poem. I wanted to show the tracks of Oppy, pictures of its discoveries. I wanted to have pictures of Mars. I wanted sounds of wind and tires over sand. But despite my best efforts I could not accomplish this, I had to try and do this another way…only text and links.

Twine is a unique platform for a poem about an exploratory rover, because I can create branching paths, and the viewer can choose where they want to go, as did the team who ran the rover. In the end, they all end in the same place though, the dark. In addition, you don’t know what you will see, you cannot look ahead, you, the reader, cannot look ahead, just as it was difficult for Oppy to look ahead too far. The reader explores the poem like the rover explored Mars. A unique capability of the platform.

The life of Oppy was not all sunsets and blissful exploring, a lot of data was gathered, and I tried to capture the unromantic, but still exciting, nature of data in the sections that talk about some of Oppy’s discoveries, I broke away from the poem feeling for those to emphasize the science.

Rest in peace little Oppy. We love you. Thank you. 

Adapted from the following poem from the Curiosity Rover Twitter:


It seems to me you lived your life

like a rover in the wind 

never fading with the sunset 

when the dust set in. 

Your tracks will always fall here, 

among Mars' reddest hills; 

your candle's burned out long before

 your science ever will.

To see the original Poem on its original platform:
https://twitter.com/MarsCuriosity/status/1095788439155306496