Opportunity’s gravestone is an asteroid orbiting in the outermost reaches of the main asteroid belt, 39382 Opportunity. The asteroid got its name in September 2004, several months after arriving on Mars, and a neighboring asteroid, 37452 Spirit, bears the name of Opportunity’s twin rover, which gave up the electronic ghost back in 2010.

The rover could have circumnavigated its 7.5 kilometer-wide, 23.6 kilometer circumference namesake roughly twice on its 45.1 kilometer trek across the Martian surface. Opportunity (the asteroid) is one of the 4,000 asteroids in the Hilda family, a bizarre group of space rocks that astronomers think originated out in the Kuiper Belt before migrating inward to the asteroid belt. We don’t know much about their composition, but based on the amount and color of light they reflect from the Sun, astronomers say they’re probably rich in carbon and pretty similar to the rocky cores of comets — which means they probably come from the same solar system neighborhood, originally.

The Hildas take about 8 years to orbit the Sun, and interestingly, they’re in a 3:2 orbital resonance with the gas giant Jupiter, so for every three laps the asteroids make around the Sun, Jupiter completes exactly two. Despite the gravitational nudges that come with an orbital resonance, the Hildas’ orbit should be stable for the next several thousand years, guaranteeing Opportunity and Spirit a lasting memorial.

Source: Forbes