Energizer

Posted on April 8, 2008

Just like the e.bunny, they keep going and going.

If you don’t hear much about them anymore, it’s just because the novelty has worn off, but the Mars rovers (Spirit and Opportunity), are still very much active and on their mission. They were expected to remain alive for 3 months on their tour, but so far have lasted 16 times that. That’s right, they’ve been exploring for over 4 years! That’s pretty amazing.

In fact, since they long ago finished their planned work, everything else has been pretty much uncharted territory so I suppose you could say NASA has had to create busy work for them. After all, rocks is rocks, so they probably are not gaining a lot of really useful info (I’m sure NASA folks would disagree with that ’spurious’ assessment), but what do you do to reward two faithful explorers. Lay ‘em to rest? That wouldn’t be very nice, so they are just working them til they die. There, that’s better.

If you’re interested, give a read to all that has happened at their site.