rover

No, I don't feel sad for the poor rover stuck in a cold sandtrap on another planet, cruelly abandoned after years of faithful service. I do not feel sorry for it.

The rover, and crucially, the foreign object, do not fit the modelled distribution, so they stand out in stark contrast.

The idea that even a self-aware rover would want to go back to Earth is blas anthropomorphism. The rovers weren't created to live in our gravity, or our atmosphere, or our ecosystem; they were created to live on Mars.

It's awesome that they've been involving the public so much in the details of how the rover mission really works. I'd actually been wondering about this exact question, since it seems to be one of the limiting factors for the quality of images and such.

All factual information can be summarized in two sentences: "The mars rover lasted longer than expected because we did not anticipate the strong winds blowing dust off the solar panels. Furthermore, the rocker-bogie suspension system kept the machine from toppling over."

There was an article on reddit questioning why we can track a rover on Mars but not a commercial airliner on Earth. Our ability to track something is a lot easier when things are going right. When something catastrophic happens, whether to a 777 out over the ocean or a rover on Mars, suddenly tracking the objects becomes a lot more difficult.

Org/wiki/Venera_13 A Russian rover that landed on Venus in 1981 - designed to last the harsh environment of Venus for 32 minutes but actually lasted 127 minutes. An extraordinary engineering achievement to have a rover go from freezing space temperatures to temperatures of over 450c.

It makes sense to put a thermoelectric generator in a satellite or rover because the mechanical parts found in a traditional engine are typically very heavy and more likely to fail. So if you aren't concerned with a couple dozen pounds and the occasionally maintenance call, just use a wood-burning generator.

There's two competing software philosophies which are sometimes called "banker" and "moon rover." If you are writing a bank program, you want to catch errors immediately, to ensure that mistakes can't silently propagate. But if you are writing a moon rover, under no circumstances abort: keep going no matter what! We have two Mars rovers right now, Opportunity and Curiosity. Fittingly, these use PowerPC chips, which are in the moon rover camp: divide-by-zero is zero.