US space agency NASA is to hold a briefing today at 7 pm GMT (2 pm ET), in which it is to officially announce the Mars Opportunity Rover mission 'dead'.

The agency will have made one final attempt to contact its Opportunity Rover late last night USA time (Tuesday), eight months after the spacecraft last made contact.

The agency is expected to announce that this final attempt was unsuccessful at the press conference today.

Opportunity landed on Mars in 2004 and covered 28 miles (45 km) on the planet.

Its goal was to search for clues about the history of water on Mars. 

But a giant dust storm last year blocked sunlight from Mars, stopping Opportunity's solar-powered batteries from being able to recharge.

Despite NASA engineers' best efforts to get a response via radio channels, its last communication was on June 10, 2018 after more than 600 attempts since August. 

Robotic rover missions are an important part of human space exploration because these tools also help inform NASA's efforts to send people to the surface of Mars sometime in the coming decades.

NASA has vowed to send people to Mars by 2030, but experts say it could take at least 25 years from now before humans could survive on the planet.

Daily Mail