.....and I guess we do too!!

  Last weekend I heard a report on CNN that the two Mars rovers have been up there for a year now.  Their solar collectors haven't picked up as much dust as the boys at NASA thought so the two machines have power to spare.  They continue roaming the serface of Mars, examining rock outcrops and beaming pictures back to Earth.  Not bad for a piece of equipment that was only suppose to last for three months.  The guys at NASA know that any one fault can bring an end to it all and that everything they've been receiving is "gravy".  But as one NASA tech. put it, "We've long past exceeded our warrenties!"

I think its history in the making, they have may some amazing discoveries on this mission, more than any of the previous combined.  But, I think that the failures of NASA's space probes are vastly overemphaised.  They really haven't lost that many-most them are successiful (but, they have had a couple real failures in the last decade or so).

What I think is amazing about this mission is what is has done and what it started out with.  If any of you guys followed this thing earily on, they had serious (what they thought might be mission critical) problems not long after the rovers were deployed.  They discovered a major computer problem in one of them when they tried to do a simple maneuver (and since both rovers are identical) they thought for a short time the mission might be a complete failure.  But, they figured it out over the course of a week or so and got it fixed.  Now look at what they have done-I think its pretty amazing.