Talk:Timeline of Opportunity

Why doesn't timeline include planning, manufacture, launch, interplanetary path, and orbit?
My title says it all. For some reason, I seem to recall that Opportunity got to Mars before Spirit, but that may not be correct, it certainly bounced down AFTER Spirit. I don't understand why this info isn't included as part of timeline. (I'll grant you that perhaps technically, the "mission" didn't start until after landing (but that should also be defined, if true. Still, no reason to ignore milestones prior to then, is there? There is really no information on the main Wiki page on these things, either. Like when was mission proposed, when was it funded (I know its not necessarily this straight-forward), was it entirely US designed, when was it assembled, what was its flight path, did it stay in Earth or Mars orbit, etc.)Abitslow (talk) 16:00, 27 March 2015 (UTC)

Current active date should it stay manual edits or have updating code? editing standard question for consensus
I don't want to add an automatic updating code of July 29, 2024 without a more experienced editor's guidance/judgement. If current day/date is showing above in this comment instead of the code, please see "edit talk" page for the code to insert in place of the "December 11th 2017" recent date edit. Which was manually updated, although the mission's length has use of code for keeping track of increasing time. I feel adding it would be correct but would like to let that choice be confirmed or dismissed by a more experienced editor's judgement. The Rover's end of mission will be noticed and news worthy, so the code would be removed and final date put in for shut/break down. With missionary summary updates likely added by many. So I don't feel it would lead to false information in the article. Opportunity has presently made it through the worse of its 8th Martian winter season as of December 8, 2017 from space.com news source. So much for those lowly mission planned 90 days of life... Insert XKCD'S comic 1504 here 2602:306:CE27:DC90:70B0:BA83:FBCA:7CFB (talk) 11:20, 11 December 2017 (UTC)