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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."
I heard you were the shortstop. Also, she's sick of the bunting.
Fascism trolls keeping me up every night. When I starts a preachin', he HITS ME WITH HIS REICH!
While scientists say this is such a huge feat, with millions to billions of dollars spent on such machinary you would think these things would last for more than 90 days. Also with all of the people working on one project could they miss something to be so dentrimental to the operation?
While it may be good exploring other planets, I still do not see why we put so much funding into it. With the US debt only rising shouldn't we consider utilizing some of that money to pay off national debt. Thinking about it in a personal expense if we have a ton of debt could we still take most of our incomes and build new toys to play around with?
I think this is interesting nonetheless but we should really look at our own economy instead of exploring planets with millions apon billions of dollars.
So, you are OK with 1 out of 10 MANNED Missions (Shuttle, ISS, etc.) failing with loss of the crew and the vehicle? Glad you are not running NASA. Shuttle is about 1 in 100 failures (2 losses in just over 200 missions) and BOTH those could have been prevented with better engineering. The extra engineering costs are minute compared to losing the whole mission.