The Rovers That Just Won't Quit

smooth wombat writes "Like the Energizer bunny, the two martian rovers just won't quit. Spirit, after climbing to the top of Husband Hill during the past year, spent two months examining rocks at the top of the hill and scientists confirmed that those rocks were similar to rocks found along the side of the hill indicating that Husband Hill is probably the result of an impact crater. It will take about two months for Spirit to make its way down the hill after which the next target will be a feature called Home Plate located about a half mile away. Opportunity is exploring the northern rim of Erebus Crater, the largest crater between already-explored Endurance Crater and its next destination, Victoria Crater. The rovers were only supposed to last three months but have been operating for almost two years. NASA has also released a 360 degree panorama of images taken by Spirit as it explored Gustav Crater."

Comments

Why not more?

[EriktheGreen]

So, why aren't we applauding these things louder, and mass producing twenty or thirty more? They're a raging success, a proven concept, and surely cheaper than developing a completely new exploration system for other worlds. We should take the plans and use them to build an army of rovers for mars, then put an equal number on the moon... we could explore the moon from laboratories, universities, offices and homes on earth directly.

Oh, that's right... NASA's main purpose isn't exploration or science, it's to preserve its own existence. New projects mean new money, and old sucesses are only good for arguing for more funding for new toys.

Erik

Re:One thing no one is really talking about...

[Rasta Prefect]

These things are horribly over-engineered. Not that it is a bad thing they are proving so resilliant, but we're now at 8x the "designed" life span. In my mind, that means they could have probably built it half as robust and still been outstanding pieces of machinery(and alot less expensive).

Thats a problem with your mind, not with NASA's strategy. In short, the actual construction costs of the rovers are a very small portion of the cost of a mission of this nature. Skimping on the construction isn't going to save significantly on design costs, nor is it going to reduce the cost of flinging it halfway across the solar system and monitoring it on the way.

What you call "Over-engineering" likely only increased to cost of the project by a couple of percent at most, and greatly improved the chances of success, avoiding the necessity of paying all of the overhead costs _again_ to lauch another one because this one plowed into the ground.

Penny wise, pound foolish as my Grandma would say. :)