On September 11, 2007, NASA's Mars Exploration
Rover Opportunity entered Victoria Crater on the
rover's 1,291st martian day, or sol. NASA/JPL-Caltech
Note to carmakers: Find out who the people were who built those fantastic rovers on Mars and hire them. They know how to make electric vehicles.
The rovers Spirit and Opportunity have now been operating 40 months beyond their initial 3-month planned missions. Admittedly, NASA probably set the endurance goals for the machines conservatively low; but this ruggedness must surprise even the most cynical expectations-managers.
Some people can't even keep a vacuum cleaner running for 3 years without taking it into the shop for an overhaul. But those interplanetary wonders have kept operating in arctic cold and solar-panel-blocking dust storms while sending wonderful images back to Mother Earth for three and a half years. Anyone who has tried to start and drive a car in below-zero temperatures can appreciate what a challenge it would be for a vehicle to operate on Mars, sans garage. There, temperatures are usually below 0 degrees Fahrenheit (–17° C) and range down well below -100° Fahrenheit (–73° C).
And with the science those rovers have returned, it almost makes one wonder why we need to send astronauts to Mars or even the Moon. (The answer: because we can.)
It certainly bodes well for space exploration that we can accomplish such wonderful Mars exploration missions as we have with, not people, but rovers: those cost-effective, enduring, exciting, historic, technology-developing, researching, digging, photographing, drilling, driving robots that keep on going like the Energizer bunny rabbit.
I don't know how much longer those mechanical Magellans will last. They are living on borrowed time. But a long time from now, after we've sent humans to Mars and back several times, there may be recovered pieces of those rovers in the Smithsonian to remind people of the intrepid adventures of ... machines.