Get those Kleenex ready. You'll never again see robots as just lurching, whirring, beeping hunks of metal.

In 2003, the U.S. sent two rovers to explore Mars. The documentary "Good Night Oppy" (streaming now on Amazon Prime Video) revives that epic adventure, doing for gangly interstellar probes what the Oscar-winning 2020 doc "My Octopus Teacher" did for that tentacled sea creature: humanize them.

The two rovers, Spirit and Opportunity, or Oppy, were built to last roughly 92 days. Spirit lasted six years. And Oppy rambled across 28 miles of the red planet for nearly 15 years, driving its way into the hearts of NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory scientists, who reveled in its triumphs and sweated its breakdowns. Think Pixar's "WALL-E" meets "Apollo 13."

USA TODAY spoke with "Oppy" director Ryan White and JPL engineering lead Doug Ellison about how this space adventure is really a love story.

The viral NASA tweet that started it all

Science documentaries don't typically tug at the heartstrings. But White says a 2019 viral tweet from NASA instantly convinced him and his production team that there was a very different story to tell.

Neil Armstrong took his historic "one small step" on the moon in 1969. And just three years later, the last Apollo astronauts left our celestial neighbour. Since then, hundreds of astronauts have been launched into space but mainly to the Earth-orbiting International Space Station. None has, in fact, ventured more than a few hundred kilometres from Earth.

The US-led Artemis programme, however, aims to return humans to the moon this decade—with Artemis 1 on its way back to Earth as part of its first test flight, going around the moon.

The most relevant differences between the Apollo era and the mid-2020s are an amazing improvement in computer power and robotics.