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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We want our children to go to the planets. Burt Rutan 6/21/04
Tuckers! Science! Automotive Oddities! Boycott Trek XI! Building my hot rod with the help of the intarwebs Those who would delay scientific progress for a little temporary prosperity shall have neither.

Whats the cost of the gear relative to the cost of transporting it?

Answer that question and you probably get the answer to why we aren't doing what your suggesting.

I haven't seen that they do. I've read about a mock-up, several really, stood next to one on tour, but none is a complete functional duplicate. They have different mock-ups for different purposes.

Post-breakfast edit: Here's an article, with picture, of maybe the most famous MER engineering mock-up, one used to probe solutions to driving problems: Rover Team Tests Mars Moves on Earth. You can see in the picture it is only similar to the fuctional rovers on Mars. The mockup is heavily cabled, doesn't appear to have solar panels (why bother?), and doesn't appear to actually have an enclosed body -- the Warm Electronics Box. It's probably built less massive to behave in Earth's gravity like the real rovers in Mars' gravity.

And, here's a different MER mock-up featured in an article with photo that I mentioned in the MSL thread recently: Third-Generation Mars Rover Dwarfs Predecessors. I bet that one's mostly for looks (maybe it's the one I stood near 4 years ago). It's probably empty-headed.

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i think the earth bound duplicates are built out of hardware that wasn't good enough to be used on the flight hardware- the slightly out of tolerance extra parts.
NASA's job isn't just exploration, it's also the government's R&D lab. part of NASA's reason for existing is to develop new technology and materials and to keep our best and brightest engineers busy working on stuff for us to keep them from wanting to use their knowledge and abilities for other countries- it's kindo f a national defense thing.
yes, they could just build a whole fleet of MER's and send them to all the corners of Mars, but they aren't in the business of mass production.

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"blacker than the blackest black... times infinity."- Nathan Explosion
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If you don't think R&D can be mass production, then I need to introduce you to a fellow by the name of Thomas Alva Edison. By repurposing the mock ups (if that's possible) for a mission you keep attention on the agency, which comes in handy when you need more funding. Secondly, it's really the electronics that provide the data that NASA's looking for. We can now cram the same level of electronics used in the old Apollo capsules into a cellphone. The rover designs, at least as far as chassis goes, are pretty danged good. Simply adopt those as a standard (they're built by outside fab shops, BTW) and periodically update the electronics inside of them.

And I really doubt that most of the folks working for NASA would go somewhere else. Most of them could make more money working in the private sector, and what other nation would hire them? I can't see the ESA getting into the unmanned exploration business to the extent that NASA is and the Russians certainly aren't going to do that, either.

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We want our children to go to the planets. Burt Rutan 6/21/04
Tuckers! Science! Automotive Oddities! Boycott Trek XI! Building my hot rod with the help of the intarwebs Those who would delay scientific progress for a little temporary prosperity shall have neither.

yeah, the MER rovers have proven to be a good design- but they are working on better designs at NASA centers and their contractors all around the country. NASA only gets the budget it does because the technology and materials that are developed by them and their subcontractors can be put to use in the defense and private sectors.
if there was no NASA to distribute that money, how much high tech r&d do you think would be done in the private sector of the USA? much of what we have and take for granted today is a direct result of NASA being there to develop stuff for both manned and unmanned space flight.
and if there was no work here, what's to stop our best and brightest from either going into non-technical fields here or going to some other country that's willing to pay them to work on their next generations of weapons?
i don't see NASA as a scientific agency- i see it mostly as an r&d agency for our military and as a civil works agency for our smartest people- both of which are good reasons to keep it around and give it more money.

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

Well, depending upon who's counting, there's eight or more planets in the solar system along with a buncha moons. How's about we start sending rovers to some of them? If we have a standard "Mars Delivery Platform," we can then take some of that cash which is no longer needed to design new Martian rovers and start building a standard "Venus Delivery Platform," a standard "Ceres Delivery Platform" maybe even a standard "Pluto Delivery Platform." Each one of those will require the same (or greater) level of R&D as a Mars rover and will return plenty of scientific data as well.
Who said anything about getting rid of NASA? No one. I'm suggesting ways in which NASA can get more bang out of it's meager budget.Thank you, Captain Obvious.
You really think that the guys who work for NASA would really go into weapons work? They could do that now and make more money at it, but they don't. They stay working for the red headed step-child of the government. No doubt if we were so foolish as to completely cut the budget for NASA, the staff would immediately start looking at the civilian space sector and starting up their own companies (if they couldn't get a job at VirginGalactic, Bigelow, etc.) and only pull up stakes and head for some other country if they couldn't do any of those. The reason the scientists of the Soviet Union were a worry was because the economy there had totally imploded, ours hasn't quite reached that point. Yet.
Ever heard of DARPA? They do most of the R&D for the military, NASA handles a portion of it, but they are primarily charged with developing space and aviation technology used for benefitting everyone here, not just the military.

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We want our children to go to the planets. Burt Rutan 6/21/04
Tuckers! Science! Automotive Oddities! Boycott Trek XI! Building my hot rod with the help of the intarwebs Those who would delay scientific progress for a little temporary prosperity shall have neither.

you called me Captain Obvious, then type this later in the very same post...
we should join forces and go around pointing out things that everyone already knows.
if someone at NASA comes up with something that is of military use, who do you think gets it first- the military or us lowly civilians?
the people that work for NASA even tho they could make more elsewhere do it because it's freaking NASA, and even if it isn't the most glorious or best organized or best funded agency in the world, it is the one they all want to work for, if only to be able to tell their grandkids that they worked there. plus, they can make connections with people there- connections that can help them later in their careers.
one of my cousins works for a contractor at the NASA center in Alabama and he could be making easily twice as much money elsewhere, but he's there working on the pieces that will hold the different stages of the ARES rocket together.. his job is to make sure that the "real techs" (as he put it) can get to things on the launchpad if they need servicing before launch. he's doing it so that he can say to his kids someday that he helped put people back on the moon and then off to Mars, and to have it on his resume.
one thing that would be cool, tho, would be if NASA -or JPL or whoever actually owns the plans- would sell the MER blueprints to a private company so they could build a bunch of them, then launch them to Mars on private rockets. this way, a good chunk of that r&d cost could be recouped, and we'd be able to get dozens of those durable little buggers rolling over the hills and dunes of Mars.

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

NASA's fairly agnostic when it comes to such matters and the "military only" aspects of their work is a rather small portion. Generally, NASA tries to get it's spin-off technologies out to as many people as possible as quickly as possible, it helps them score important brownie points when they go asking for funding.
Which proves my point.
I wish him luck, but I have the feeling that the Chinese are going to be the next folks to set foot on the Moon.
That would be NASA, as the government agency in charge generally gets to hold all the patent rights and the like.Given that the OS for the rovers is freely available, I imagine that if you know where to look, you could probably turn up all the data on the rover designs. The big problem with your scheme is that no private company would want to do that as it would be difficult, if not impossible for them to make a profit off of the rovers. Certainly, there's ample long term profit which can be made from such work, but corporations are more focused on the end of the quarter than they are on something that might not pay off for a decade or more, if ever. There's also the problem of getting all the data back to the Earth. Right now, the data from the rovers is uplinked to a NASA sat in orbit of Mars and then beamed back to the Earth, where it's picked up by NASA controlled dishes. There's limited bandwidth, and limited amounts of time in which everything lines up so NASA can pick up the data. NASA's not going to have the spare cash to handle the traffic from someone else's gear. There's probably enough slack in the system that they could pick up some of it, but they certainly can't spare the personnel to study the data like it would need to be.

The best we could hope for, in a privately funded scientific expedition to Mars would be soil analysis, as they'd be looking for something they could mine. One could, in theory, if they had the right connections and knew a salesman who could sand to desert dwellers, make a profit (and possibly get the whole mission funded) through TV rights and ad revenues. To keep viewers interested, you'd need to have a Battlebots-type TV show. You could start out showing the teams designing and building their robots, which would use their tools to do scientific research and beat the crap out of the other robots. You'd have to launch a satellite to Mars capable of handling HD broadcasts and beaming them back to Earth, along with a camera blimp to cover the action. Once the bots reached Mars (about 2 years after launch), you'd want them dropped in roughly the same general area, but not so close to one another that they could find their opponents right away. You could build a web 2.0 type community around the competition to help keep interest up, as well as generate revenue. I doubt that anyone would be willing to do this, however.

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We want our children to go to the planets. Burt Rutan 6/21/04
Tuckers! Science! Automotive Oddities! Boycott Trek XI! Building my hot rod with the help of the intarwebs Those who would delay scientific progress for a little temporary prosperity shall have neither.

Sojourner had a duplicate that looked almost the same called Marie Curie, if I remember correctly.

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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

NASA Tech Briefs is a good example of that. I've read the paper version for almost 20 years.

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Marie Curie was indeed the flight spare for Sojourner. It was destined to fly on the 2001 Lander as part of the Athena Precursor Mission to Mars. That lander was cancelled and then reborn as Phoenix - with a different payload ( sans Marie Curie)

There are instances of spares flying. MOC on MGS was infact a spare from Mars Observer, as were several of the instruments on MGS, MCO and MODY. HRSC on MEX is a reflight of an instrument lost on Mars 96, as are Aspera and Spicam. Venus Express carries a copy of the PFS from Mars Express. The orbit insertion motors on MRO were grabbed from the 2001 lander. The spare CCD's from Spirit and Opportunity are onboard Phoenix inside a derivation of the MPF SSI. The TES on MGS because the Mini-TES of MER. The APXS of Pathfinder became the APXS of MER. CTX from MRO becomes LROC on LRO, and MARCI on MRO becomes the WA part of LROC. PMIRR on Mars Observer became PMIRR on Mars Climate Orbiter, became MCS on MRO. The RAC camera on Phoenix is derived from the CCD of the MPF SSI.

What you say should be happening, essentially...is.

Flying things like the mobility model and engineering model of MER is out of the question. It's probably more old and broken than Spirit and Opportunity are (which are both still working, contrary to what you say). There is little of Mars suitable for MER style landings, maybe in the future MER design heritage rovers will fly - but currently there is no hardware that could do so, nor the money for such a mission.

There is also massive unseen heritage inside of most spacecraft - at the 'box' level. The flight computer is usually a RAD6000 or RAD750 - both flown many many many times. The batteries from MER are on Phoenix - as is the UHF system. The small deep space transponder is an X-band part used many times over.

There is more recycling and heritage in spaceflight than you might imagine.

Yay! I got something right!

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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

One clarification, the Rovers run VxWorks onboard, Maestro is a ground tool.

For a more general answer to your OP, engineering model hardware is, depending on it's intended use, typically not fabricated to flight standards. In other words, not built with parts screened to flight quality standards, not built under supervision of quality assurance, not fully encapsulated. NASA very rarely funds the production of qualification models, which would be built to flight specs, and could serve as a flight spare.

Engineering hardware often contains design tweaks needed to make the thing work, which are carefully incorporated into the final flight design, but on the EM can sometimes be made by engineers in the middle of the night in a "less than flight" manner. ;-)

Not radiation hardened.

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I use rad-hard parts for my EMs unless it's absolutely impossible. I've seen too many people get burnt when they find out that the rad-hard parts aren't exactly like the standard ones. The whole point of the EM is to find the problems before you get to flight build.