On Mars

[james_davis_nicoll]

Eight years into a 90 day mission, Opportunity endures.

Meanwhile, elsewhere on Mars....

Comments

[bastets-place.livejournal.com]

The xkcd cartoon makes me feel strangely poignant.

[james-nicoll.livejournal.com]

It's surprisingly easy to humanize rovers. (http://groups.google.com/group/rec.arts.sf.fandom/msg/5bea86a444e5506a?hl=en&)

[chomiji]

Awww, Mars Rovers! >huggles them<

(Yup, very easy to anthropomorphize ... and that xkcd strip breaks my heart. Poor little Spirit!)

[wayward-va.livejournal.com]

Would it have added that much weight to put on a windshield wiper to brush off the dust?

[hopdavid.livejournal.com]

Give it arms and you have Wall-E

[beamjockey.livejournal.com]

I'm glad the rovers were wise enough to refrain from shooting up any Mysteron cities.

[zibblsnrt.livejournal.com]

I don't think they were expected to last nearly long enough for that to be a concern.

[krfsm.livejournal.com]

See also the plethora of Rover- and other probe-livejournals (spiritrover and opportunitygrrl are the two first ones I recalled, but there are tons more - you should be able to find most of them easily from their profiles).

[fridgepunk.livejournal.com]

THIS IS THE VOICE OF THE MYSTERONS. WE ARE TREATING YOUR ADORABLE DIPLOMATES WELL. WHO IS AN ADORABLE DIPLOMAT? YOU IS. YES YOU ARE. DAMN IT I THOUGHT YOU HAD TURNED THE THING OFF. WELL TURN IT OFF-

[anzhalyumitethe.livejournal.com]

The MERs were, iirc, actually used for part of WALL-Es design.

[anzhalyumitethe.livejournal.com]

The Spirit died before the Opportunity.

Just saying...

[kiya]

Not to say there weren't a few incidents.

[peter-erwin.livejournal.com]

Not to mention the fact that a "windshield wiper" that would continue to work reliably over several years under Martian conditions (near vacuum, wide swings in temperature, etc.) wouldn't have been trivial to engineer.