I’ve got to be close to the last person on the Internet to link to this, but in the unlikely event that you haven’t already seen it, Phil Plait presents the best astronomy pictures of 2006. My personal favorite of his images is probably this one:
We haven’t sent all that many probes to Mars, and it’s not often that they snap pictures of each other. And the Mars rovers are really a fabulous story– it’s rare to see the kind of Murphy’s Law violation that turns a 90-day mission into more than 1000 days of continuous operation.
I just wish she’d update her LiveJournal.
But that is Murphy’s Law! Not A Space Agency Offically set out for a short cheap piss into a golden thimble. The engineers snuck in a Trojan Horse that will not die. Two of them. NASA dare not shut down its smoke generators and mirror facility (re the Hubble and its crappy mirror). Man in Space is so much politically nicer. When you wish to change horses you accidently kill your mount.
Anthropomorphization is always entertaining. And in the same vein of seeing our works, some of the animations from the Deep Impact mission are similarly interesting.
There actually is a fairly simple reason for the extended lifespan. They originally thought that the rovers would die of power starvation when dust piled up on the solar panels. It turns out that in the regions of Mars they landed in, dust devils come along often enough to clean them off.