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Mars Rover Spirit Still Alive
Toren Altair writes with this excerpt from a story at The Space Fellowship: "NASA's Mars Exploration Rover Spirit communicated via the Mars Odyssey orbiter today right at the time when ground controllers had told it to, prompting shouts of 'She's talking!' among the rover team at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, Calif. 'This means Spirit has not gone into a fault condition and is still being controlled by sequences we send from the ground,' said John Callas of NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, Calif., project manager for Spirit and its twin, Opportunity."
My understanding: The thing that the designers had decided was that the weight of a dust removal system was not worth removing a scientific instrument to do so, because they had a weight and size budget to deal with. They didn't think there was an effective means to clean the dust to extend the lifetime of the rover vs. less data recovered.
Spirit has gone 4.8 miles so far, and Opportunity has gone 7.68 miles.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spirit_rover http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Opportunity_rover and http://marsrovers.nasa.gov/
4c:61:7a:79
I'm quite sure that about 95% of the cost of the two rovers has been the building and actually launching them all the way to Mars. Now the rovers themselves do not cost extra money, only the salaries of the scientists operating them. Extending the life of these rovers is for sure more cost-effective than sending a new one. Even if the new one comes with upgraded or different instruments.
Except standard units is another term for US or 'English' units. Your attempt at pedantry fails.
Yes, metric is the accepted international standard. No, what GP referred to was not 'the standard' but what is known as 'standard units'.
Never knew about Lunokhod. That's pretty amazing. Of course, the orders of magnitude shorter communications time probably helped a lot.