Good Night Oppy

Good Night Oppy (2022) is Ryan White's documentary, and you can watch it online on iFILM. It follows Opportunity, the Mars rover sent up for a three-month assignment that somehow kept rolling for fifteen years.

The engineers at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory nicknamed her Oppy. Planned for ninety sols, she instead lived through dust storms that nearly starved her solar panels, a jammed wheel she had to drag, and a bout of memory loss patched by people millions of miles away who couldn't so much as touch her. White stitches together real mission footage with photoreal reconstructions built by Industrial Light & Magic, with Angela Bassett narrating and the actual flight team — Steve Squyres, Jennifer Trosper, Abigail Fraeman — telling it firsthand.

What lands isn't the hardware; it's the bond. The film treats a robot like a member of the family, and the day Oppy goes quiet hits harder than most fiction. Easy to recommend to anyone who loves space, engineering, or a good cry. Stream Good Night Oppy (2022) online on iFILM.