NASA's Equipment Mock Ups
I know for many of the various pieces of hardware NASA sends out into the void, they build near (if not exact duplicates) identical mock ups for troubleshooting use here on Earth. This makes sense, of course, if something goes wrong, it's much easier to get an idea to figure it out if you can stare at the thing itself, instead of just the blueprints. (It also allows you to tinker with the stuff and see if your diagnosis/fix/workaround will do the trick or not.) I have to wonder what happens to that gear when NASA's done with it. I'm guessing that it goes on display in a museum or someplace.
I wonder, though, if that really makes sense. After all, if, for example, you've got a complete duplicate of one of the Mars robots here on Earth, and you no longer need it to diagnose problems on the ones on Mars (as they've quit working), why not send the duplicate to Mars? Oh sure, the gear on it is now no longer state of the art, but it's built and paid for, so you could, in theory, send it to some other spot on Mars to look at things there, for much less money than it would take to design a new one from scratch and send it. If it failed when it got there, or even earlier in the mission than expected, it's not nearly the loss that a brand new mission would be.
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