Spirit claims Mars water prize

[dlavery]

On January 3 and January 24 we will be celebrating the one-year anniversary of the Spirit and Opportunity landings. At that point, it certainly appears that both rovers will still be merrily driving their way across the surface of Mars. This is something that we never really expected - we built these machines to last 90 sols (Mars days), and thought we would be extraordinarily fortunate if they survived for 120-150 sols. To now be heading for a full year of operations is a real head rush! Based on the mechanical wear rates we are seeing, they have the potential to go on for a very long time past that. We have stopped trying to predict how long the rovers will last. Of course, it could all come to a screeching halt tomorrow if any of about a gazillion small items does finally wear out or fail. So we are just looking at each additional day of operations as a gift from a system that is currently working at 300% of the original design lifetime, and grabbing on to each additional bit of information we are able to gather. And at the same time, there is a small army of scientists that are already rewriting all the text books on what we know about Mars, based on the discoveries enabled by these little machines.

-dave