I was the MER Spirit Mission Manager, and I was on Mars time for three months in 2004. I adapted to it and liked it. I got to sleep in an extra 40 minutes a day. I had blackout curtains in my bedroom, so that I could sleep in the dark. However I was one of only a few who voted to stay on Mars time after the end of the primary mission. Most of the people on the operations team didn't like Mars time.

This stars whizzing by us are going fast. While the distance may be short, the energy required to rendezvous with a "nearby" star will be far greater than the energy required to travel to a more distant star that has a low relative velocity with ours.

News flash: Combine Harvesters destroy more jobs than they create. Good thing too.

Like everything here ...

You can be trained to hear the lossy compression artifacts. But trust me, you don't want to be. Once you can hear them, you can't unhear them.

RTFA. The mutation was ~85 kya. The popular article also gets this wrong in their title.

There are plenty of ways to lambaste scientologists (with all of the ways graciously provided directly by them), but this? Yeah sure, the divorce of a Hollywood couple is so unusual, I can see how that would reflect negatively on any group associated with it.

Awesome. I still have my Heathkit Vacuum Tube Voltmeter. I need to dig it out and see if it still works ...

Actually MSL is about six times the mass of an MER rover.

... is rolling his eyes in his grave. The guy who built the very first nuclear reactor on Earth (at least in the last two billion years or so) was an Italian-American physicist.

And then they realize that they have all men up there on the current rotation ...

It's a small world, but I wouldn't want to paint it.

-- Steven Wright

Scott wrote:

Actually I was one of the wild optimists on the project, and before landing I predicted that (if they successfully landed and deployed, which was not a given), that they would survive up to solar conjunction in September 2004, or about eight months. More than double the warranty lifetime. I said "Opportunity might make it through conjunction a go a little longer, but I doubt it."

I recall that Jake Matijevic agreed with my calculation -- it was based on his "minimum watt-hours per sol" survival numbers at the time, which he has since improved on by a factor of two or more. But no one on the project predicted survival beyond conunction.

If someone told us five years, we would have laughed. "Impossible", we would have confidently replied ...

The author should have counted. Only seven were listed in the article. He/she left out Asteroid Rover/Sample Return (on page 7 of the announcement).

Absolutely, yes, this rover is a spacecraft. For one thing, it has most of the typical subsystems of a spacecraft, including the computer and data storage, deep space communications gear, solar and battery power systems, attitude sensing, scientific instruments including cameras, etc. It is simply a spacecraft that happens to be sitting on a planetary surface, and that has wheels.

Second, the rover *was* the spacecraft that flew to Mars and landed there. It was not a passenger. The folded up rover inside the aeroshell contained most of the subsystems for the cruise to Mars and entry, descent, and landing. That rover was the heart and brains for the trip to Mars and the landing, and controlled all of those events.

Outside of the rover on the "cruise stage" was the attitude control rockets and propellant, and the star and Sun trackers for attitude sensing, and some more solar panels. Those burned up in the Martian atmosphere when Spirit entered inside its aeroshell. The rover doesn't need those on the surface, since gravity and the ground provide attitude stability, it uses its cameras and an inertial measurement unit for attitude sensing, and uses the wheels for attitude and translational control.