Red Planet explorer: Good Night Oppy

GOOD NIGHT OPPY
Directed by Ryan White
Certificate: PG
☆☆☆☆☆

IT was, said the scientist, like hitting a hole in one over a 300-million-mile tee off.

This nugget is typical of the mind-blowing story of Opportunity, a robotic geologist blasted off to Mars on a 90-day mission that would eventually last 15 years.

Known as Oppy, it was one of a pair of machines Nasa sent to the Red Planet in 2003 to search for geological clues to see, crucially, if it ever contained water, and therefore life.

The documentary enjoys an extensive archive. We see the scientists and engineers when Oppy was but a series of sketches. We have a ringside seat – augmented by attractively self-deprecating interviews – and watch the tension as Nasa hope they have got decimal points in the right place as they shoot this expensive bundle of wiring out of the earth’s atmosphere.

Some moments are a moving celebration of the joy of intellectual collaboration: how doing something tricky with another person is twice as satisfying. The joy expressed when mission control see their hypothetical calculations translate to the real adventure of their two little explorers is shivery-sweet.

It helps that Oppy is cute as a button, a Steven Spielberg sort of hero. The Nasa team act as benevolent guardians and as they explain, when you put two cameras on an extendable bit of metal and at a certain distance apart from each other, they look like eyes. Oppy, and her less fortunate sibling, Spirit, have the same sort of pull as Metal Mickey or K9.

Oppy is sent trundling across Mars – the interviews with people who drive a Rover for a living show the eccentric roles at Nasa. Like any good road trip, Oppy faces numerous obstacles: dust storms, chunks of rock, stretches of quicksand. Its earth-bound controllers find inventive ways out of scrapes, which include building a stand in Mars landscape with a stand-in Oppy.

There is a down-to-earthness about each interviewee, as if what they do is such a tremendously complicated occupation that they are conditioned to speak about it in as simple terms as possible.

“There’s no manual about how to get a Rover out of a sand dune, so we built a model and tried to do it here,” says one engineer.

“In the end, we decided the best course was to just stick it in to reverse and gun it.”