Yeah, forget that iPhone, these are the real miracle machines!

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Rovers forever! - ToSeek
"Carl Sagan sent a message to ET,
Neil Armstrong walked in the Sea of Tranquility
Steve Squyers built Spirit and Opportunity
Dan Haylen upchucked in zero gravity." -Brent Simon, The Space Camp Song
'Evolution and science are one thing, but you don’t mess with Yoko Ono. Everybody knows that. ' - 386sx

Let's make a prediction on how long they will last.

My predictions are:

Spirit - May/2010

Opportunity - September/2016

Closest wins!

What are you considering the test of when they've finished 'lasting'? Is it when researchers stop having a budget to communicate with them, or when they become physically unable to communicate?

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Forming opinions as we speak

And I suspect it might not even be a black and white thing for those two questions. For example, I can imagine one of the them becoming immobile, but still operating at some level, as a weather station for example, with some minimal data analysis at some low budget level.

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At night the stars put on a show for free (Carole King)

Something in me finds that morally wrong.

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Rovers forever! - ToSeek
"Carl Sagan sent a message to ET,
Neil Armstrong walked in the Sea of Tranquility
Steve Squyers built Spirit and Opportunity
Dan Haylen upchucked in zero gravity." -Brent Simon, The Space Camp Song
'Evolution and science are one thing, but you don’t mess with Yoko Ono. Everybody knows that. ' - 386sx

Not at all, it was a reference to a toaster I bought my mother that died 13 months later.

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Howling from the Shadows

It must be fun to lead a life completely unburdened by reality. --- JayUtah

You can't reason an irrational person out of an irrational belief. --- Noclevername

Apollo: The History and the Hoax
Enter the World of Athran

Which ever one is closest to my prediction

Why? They've already lasted long beyond the original predictions. What's wrong with new ones?

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"If this were play'd upon a stage now, I could condemn it as an improbable fiction."
Shakespeare, Twelfth Night
Illuminati's Razor-The most complicatedly evil answer is usually the most correct answer. - Fazor
"Every book is a children's book if the kid can read." - Mitch Hedberg
"Distance doesn’t matter much in space, where if you just start a thing off with the right kind of shove, sooner or later it will get where you want it to go." -Frederik Pohl, Mining the Oort

I don't want to tempt fate.

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Rovers forever! - ToSeek
"Carl Sagan sent a message to ET,
Neil Armstrong walked in the Sea of Tranquility
Steve Squyers built Spirit and Opportunity
Dan Haylen upchucked in zero gravity." -Brent Simon, The Space Camp Song
'Evolution and science are one thing, but you don’t mess with Yoko Ono. Everybody knows that. ' - 386sx

keep in mind that they are just robots- incredibly cool and well built robots- that have outlasted their target lifetimes by- what?- 20 times over?
if one or both of them failed to communicate tomorrow- like, say, if that race of Bigfoot looking creatures they found up there decided to take them out- it wouldn't be a good thing, but life goes on.

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"blacker than the blackest black... times infinity."- Nathan Explosion
The.. Best.. Thread..Ever...

I have a feeling that if one of the rovers were to konk out tomorrow, the media would spin it as another NASA failure.

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I'm not a scientist, but I play one on the internet.
http://www.rrac.org

I doubt it. If you take a look at the media, it's been a couple years since the MERs have even been mentioned. If Spirit dies this Martian winter from too much dust and not enough photons hitting the solar panels, it will maybe get a footnote, and a brief retrospective.

Do you remember seeing ANY coverage of when the Viking landers stopped communicating?

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Forming opinions as we speak

if NASA were to handle the 'death" of one or both of the rovers properly, they could spin it as the most amazing thing they've ever done- but that they have this even bigger and badder nukyouler powered rover going to Mars in a couple of years that is designed to last even longer and do more stuff. they could get the public behind NASA again- right up until the new rover fails to land properly- with the whole world watching- or "dies" after only a couple of weeks on Mars or something. in that situation, they might have a bit of a PR dilemma on their hands, which could spill over to what little real true public support there is out there for the Moon/Mars program..

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"blacker than the blackest black... times infinity."- Nathan Explosion
The.. Best.. Thread..Ever...

I've kind of become tied to them, sappy though that may sound. They were launched the year I reached double digits. A bit like friends I've never met.

__________________
Rovers forever! - ToSeek
"Carl Sagan sent a message to ET,
Neil Armstrong walked in the Sea of Tranquility
Steve Squyers built Spirit and Opportunity
Dan Haylen upchucked in zero gravity." -Brent Simon, The Space Camp Song
'Evolution and science are one thing, but you don’t mess with Yoko Ono. Everybody knows that. ' - 386sx

They are doing really well & I keep a fairly close tab on them!

The latest panoramic image published, taken by Spirit, is a tremendous example of what these rovers can do.

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"A wild scheme, it would be useless undertaking”

Charles Darwin's father on hearing of his son's plans to join HMS Beagle

SpaceMad's Space Page

Helmut Lotti Fan Club

Join me on the BeyondSpace forum at
http://beyondspace.info/forum/index.php
A bilingual forum in English & Spanish

The regular monthly update from The Planetary Society:

Spirit and Opportunity Begin Fifth Year of Exploration in Shadow of "Little Sasquatch "

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Everything I need to know I learned through Googling.

big foot strikes again. at least they can still capture people's imagination.


just think. Maybe this IS a NASA conspiracy, one to raise the general public's awareness. HAHA, joke is on us.

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"I will do my best to understand and explain the universe from big to small without invoking miracles, unrepeatable events, or divine intervention. In place of those things I will use observations, mathematics, and science."


-Cross
My travel blog

Some of my Astrophotography


Those that lack education have a hard time understanding its value. - Cross

Not much earth-shattering found within Victoria. Perhaps when they get out they can explore this:

14-June-2007, 03:06 PM
A closer look at "Sputnik" crater by Opportunity?


Bob Clark

Nah, just the annual end-of-year gift to science that The Powers That Be always give us. In '97, we got Hale-Bopp. In '06, we got that giant squid.

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Rovers forever! - ToSeek
"Carl Sagan sent a message to ET,
Neil Armstrong walked in the Sea of Tranquility
Steve Squyers built Spirit and Opportunity
Dan Haylen upchucked in zero gravity." -Brent Simon, The Space Camp Song
'Evolution and science are one thing, but you don’t mess with Yoko Ono. Everybody knows that. ' - 386sx