Blogsplosion

Three posts in one day? Is this the first sign of the Apocalypse?

I would like to offer my unofficial congratulations to all involved in the Mars Rovers project. Both have now been on Mars for over 1000 Mars-days. This is approximately 1025 Earth-days. They are still going, and now that the Martian Winter is waning, it is quite possible that they will last another 300 days or more, barring mechanical failure. The pictures of Victoria Crater are inspiring. (See sidebar link.) It just boggles my mind to comprehend the engineering effort that went in to making this happen, and making it happen so well. The only problem is that this may now be used as the new benchmark of success in the media, and subsequent missions (e.g. MSL rover in 2009/2010), even if surpassing their design lifetimes, could still be considered by some to be failures.

By the way, now that the rovers have lived to see the arrival of MRO, is it possible that they will still be there when Phoenix lands? That would be incredible, but I wouldn't bet against it.

Side Note: I found it hilarious that there was a S(ol)1K bug in the image viewing webpages. Because 1000 comes alphabetically before 999, you had to scroll down to the bottom to see the most recent images! This was quickly fixed, but amusing still.