For the humans who are monitoring these rovers, it would be advantageous to keep the rovers running for their own job security, at the very least, and to make scientific discoveries for NASA.
Also, the longer these rovers are operational, the more the so-called Martian enthusiasts would find "evidence" for life and past civilization on the planet. ---In FairfieldLife@yahoogroups.com, <anartaxius@...> wrote : Doing much better than its sibling which died a few years ago. The online maintenance required the team to empty all the flash memory recently because of an accumulation of errors (causing the rover to default to a safety mode) and the fix was to reformat it so Opportunity can now continue on its journey. It operation for over ten years at an average temperature of about -40 to -50 degrees Celsius is quite amazing. The daily air and ground temperatures vary from a bit above 0 degrees Celsius to about -100 degrees Celsius, so these machines need to be extraordinarily robust to survive such extremes. Meanwhile its newer cousin Curiosity is finally at a critical left turn, that after two years of driving to avoid sand dunes, it can start to approach the base of Mt. Sharp (14,000 ft) over ground that has more secure footing. The path was changed several times to avoid sharp rocky ground that caused wheel damage in that effort to skirt the dune fields. The terrain from here on will get much more complicated, eventually approaching 300 foot high buttes and mesas as well as the mountain itself. ---In FairfieldLife@yahoogroups.com, <jr_esq@...> wrote : After a reboot of its computer, which can be considered the rest and recuperation needed for machines. This rover is obviously well built given the fact that it's still operational for over 10 years, without any physical maintenance from NASA employees. http://www.universetoday.com/114595/repaired-opportunity-rover-readies-for-marathon-valley-as-it-transmits-martian-images/ http://www.universetoday.com/114595/repaired-opportunity-rover-readies-for-marathon-valley-as-it-transmits-martian-images/
