Spirit Rover is One Year Old

dolphin558 writes "The little rover that could, did. The Spirit Rover marks its one year aniversary after an expected lifetime of just 3 months. It has traversed more than 2 miles of Martian landscape and sent back thousands of pictures and reams of data. There is no indication that it will die anytime soon as it climbs the Columbia Hills."

Comments

maintenance

[confusion]

It certainly helps when you have friendly Martians maintaining it.

I'm glad to see that we've gotten our money's worth on this one.

Jerry
http://www.syslog.org/

Re:maintenance

[Iphtashu Fitz]

Reminds me of a tv commercial I saw a while ago. I forget what the product was for but the commercial showed a lone scientist sitting in front of a huge video monitor in a NASA-style control room. On the monitor was the rover. The scientest turned his head for a minute and when he looked back at the screen the rover was up on cinder blocks, it's wheels were gone, and it had been vandalized in one or two other ways. Finally, conclusive proof of intelligent(?) life on Mars!

Re:Only one *Earth* year

[dj245]

But given that it's on Mars (686.98 Earth days to complete one solar revolution), its actual Martian anniversary will come November 19th, 2005.

Its now a child of both planets, and just like the child of divorced parents, it has to celebrate all the holidays everywhere.

9 months over your estimate?

[Valar]

Someone must be held accountable! In order to maintain the proud, bureaucratic tradition of post-apollo NASA we must fire the engineers responsible. Do you have any idea how many man hours have been wasted trying to operate a rover that should have been dead months ago?

Beats the shit out of my Mitsubishi Galant

[gelfling]

In terms of years operating and miles run. Whatever these people did, we need to bottle it, pronto.