Ice lake found on the Red Planet

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Are those two rovers still operating on Mars? I haven’t heard anything on the news in quite a few months. However, I bet the rovers are quite a distance away from this new discovery?
 
Way cool! Blow the dust off, and we can have the next Winter Olympics on Mars. Just think of the jumps the skaters will get in 1/3 gravity!

I’ve been loving what they’ve been finding. I subscribe to two astronomy mags, and every month the “News” section has some new discoveries. I especially loved it when one of the orbiters photographed the wreckage of one of the landers that had gone wrong. I went in and told my wife, “They’ve found the wreckage of a spacecraft on Mars.”

Looooong pause.

“It’s one of ours.”

😛

DaveBj
 
Yes, Spirit and Opportunity are still working. It was expected that they would work for 90 days, well, 18 months later they are still working! 🙂
 
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UnworthySoul:
Yes, Spirit and Opportunity are still working. It was expected that they would work for 90 days, well, 18 months later they are still working! 🙂
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Would that be due to the less gravity and thus less stress on the mechanical parts?
 
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Edwin1961:
Would that be due to the less gravity and thus less stress on the mechanical parts?
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The major problem was thermal stress, not mechanical. It gets very cold and very hot (relatively) on Mars.
 
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UnworthySoul:
Yes, Spirit and Opportunity are still working. It was expected that they would work for 90 days, well, 18 months later they are still working! 🙂
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That British Beagle rover b-gg-red off and is still missing. Probably went to the local pub. 😃
 
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Edwin1961:
Would that be due to the less gravity and thus less stress on the mechanical parts?
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Put the engineering aside for a second, and think about politics. You tell someone you’ll get 90 days of solid science with a huge margin for error. Hey, that’s pretty good, right? Taxpayer dollars well spent, and happy politicians.

But everyone knows that barring some rediculous anomaly, those things are going to last a lot longer than 90 days. My car, designed for earth’s environment, cost me about $20k. It will last 10 years. Those rovers, designed for the Martian environment, cost a few million each, and have an army of scientists manning the controls. I think you see where I’m going with this. Low-ball the initial outcome and then say, “Wow, look how well we engineered these things!” “We never thought they’d go this long!”

The rovers’ longevity is directly proportional to future budgets.
 
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