Great replies and memories guys, thanks

As for me, well, being the Mars nut that I am I was almost unbearably excited when it came to landing day(s), having sat here at my PC watching the launches of both MERs on tiny Real Player boxes all those months previously. The night before Spirit landed I was actually a guest - the token "amateur astronomer and space enthusiast" panel member! - on a BBC Radio 5 phone in show, which linked people in Carlisle (me), London (I can't remember which author/scientists it was now... I think it was Ian Ridpath... yes, pretty sure it was...) and a MER team member over at JPL (definitely can't remember who that was now!) to discuss the next day's big events. I remember sitting in the studio, on my own, at midnight (cos of the time difference), with the big clunky headphones on thinking wow... Spirit's closing in on Mars right now, as I sit here...

( Sadly, the phone-in, which was supposed to be a serious discussion about what discoveries the rovers might make in the DAYS ahead turned into a pathetic "Couldn't the money be spent on better things?" tirade by irate callers, thanks to the go-for-the-easy-and-cheap-shot attitude of the presenter, Richard Bacon (UK board members will be nodding, thinking "Ah, no surprise there...") and Ian and I both got very frustrated with the whole thing, as the science and discovery aspects were swept aside by Angry From Milton Keynes rants about how the money should have been spent on things "down here"... the same people I'm sure who don't think twice about renting DVDs, buying takeaways or... well, don't get me started... and I went home very annoyed. But it was so late when I got back that the landing itself was just hours away, so I stayed up, bleary-eyed, and gulped down huge amounts of coffee before the coverage started...

... and as the first pictures came in I really thought that we were going to see "more of the same", thatw e'd have a couple of months, maybe six, of pictures of rocks and dunes, like a mobile Viking. The Columbias seemed like they were on the end of a martian Oregon Trail, so far out of reach they weren't even worth thinking about never mind aiming for... Then Oppy landed, that amazing cosmic hole in one in Eagle Crater, and I just thought "Well, that's it, better get used to this scenery, gonna be here a while..."

But as time passed and the rovers went on their way I began to think that yeah, this was going to be different after all. This was discovery, a trek, a genuine adventure. New pictures every day, new discoveries, new speculations... I've said it before, I know, but it really began to feel like walking alongside Lewis and Clark, seeing new landscapes and landmarks with every sunrise...

I hoped for maybe 6 months of life on Mars from one rover, with the other meeting some kind of accident or technical failure, I certainly never expected both to survive. I hoped that one of the rovers would manage to snap one image showing Earth in the sky. Yep, did that. I hoped that one of the rovers would find a meteorite on Mars, being a meteorite collector myself. Yep, did that too.

And it's just been one met challenge after another since then. I remember when Spirit stood at the foot of the Columbias, staring up at the summit of Husband, half a light year above the Gusev plain, and thinking "No way...!" But she did it.

What I didn't expect, and others have touched on this, is just how personally involved I would feel in these missions. I thought NASA might release a few pictures each week - yet every day there are dozens of new images, higher resolution than I dared imagine. I thought I'd maybe check for new pictures a couple of times a week - but I drool over new images several times a day, given the chance; I thought there'd be a couple of Forums where people would discuss NASA images - I never dreamed there'd be a place like this where people would take raw images and turn them into literally stunning works of art, unique and beautiful. I thought I'd get blase about the rovers, and not think of them as anything more than mere machines, but I find myself actually worrying about them, and hating the idea of Spirit dragging that wheel behind her in a race against time to find a slope to survive the winter on. It's crazy! They're just machines! But they're not, they're real to us, and they're our eyes on and ambassadors to this fascinating, brutal, beautiful world called Mars, and god, I'm going to miss them when they're gone.

The biggest and best surprise has been being able to share this adventure with other people, the people reading this; when I sat there on that sleep-deprived morning, watching Spirit's first images appear on my screen, smiling like an idiot at the sight of the airbags crumpled around the lander, I thought "Well, here we go, six months of lonely screen staring, nobody else 'getting it'..."

You all 'get it', and I'm not alone when I look out at this new Mars. And that's wonderful.

Gusev was quite a disappointment to me at first glance, then the rover stopped working for a while.
And like many I wondered if we even would get much images or science from this rover at all.
But when it eventually started to go the first drives were slow and it was obvious that the drivers actually
were learning the skill of driving at Mars on the go.
With all this in mind Bonneville crater wasnt even one obvious goal, but a distant hope, the hills were just a pipedream in those early days. And with the problems Spirit suffered I didnt expect it to last the mission time of 90 days.

Opportunity was another story, I got as enthusiastic as anyone with what was found in Eagle crater, but soon
wanted to move on to Endurance and the rover couldnt move fast enough for my taste. I could see the mission days ticking away and feared the rover would have any kind of mishap. I knew the potential of the rocky wall we could see from the distance on the side of Endurance. I hoped that it would provide a peek back in time to see what earlier geology might have been like. So early on I both wished and almost prayed that Opportunity would last longer than expected and be allowed a mission extension to be able to explore the crater in detail - as it eventually also did.

Edit: I have to agree with jamescanvin. I didnt expect to get captivated by a mission like this either.
And Im still trying to find the reasons for me with my background to be caught by the two rovers in this way, so im still trying to do psychoanalysing on myself about this
But the -almost- daily images changed have changed the way I use the Internet completely, and that I spend several hours a day at this are something I find unbelievable even when writing this very sentence.
Buyt the fact remains the planet always have had such a special meaning to me that as a teenager I did daydream about exploring Mars when walking on high elevation ground here where you dont see much more than soft sloping mountains, gravel and lichens groving directly on the rocks. So its not suprising, and im happy to have found a place where theres others with the same interest - thank you all!

Whouaaa! I didn't realize THE Rob Manning was in the Forum!
Since I saw you for real the day after Spirit landing day at the TPS "Creazy about Mars", you're my hero Rob. You're not only a TOP engineer, you're what we all need : a wonderfull communicator. And to stay on Stu's topic, one of my interogations after Oppy's landing was : "OK, Rob is 3 for 3 now, will he continue to give us another or more clean and successfull EDL?" I didn't expect to be able to ask you the question over the Internet ...and the UMSF forrum.
Climber

Do you remember problems of Spirit several days form landing? I thought 'this is the end'. Yes, so pessimistic I was .
I dreamed of Spirit on a top of Columbia hills. I realized, that their distance is feasible for Spirit to travel. But again I was pessimistic and treated it only as a hope.

Since then it's been one pleasing surprise .

The low point was Pete saying
"There is no one fault that explains all the observables" and looking like a head teacher telling off the class when he said it. Scared the hell out of me that did.

Doug

He also said at one point that, if recovered, Spirit will never get back to 100% capabilities! He should have said 1000% instead

I expected fossiles, abysses, crawling creatures, and even that the rovers would last long...well...not that long...but at least in that mad supposition I got right...

Hi Guys

I agree with just about everything Stu said with one exception. I do get personally involved in these missions and tell people at work things like, 'one of my landers is going to arrive today!' because they are all mine! Mine! I tell you, but I'm happy to share them with everyone at UMSF.
While I've got the basic geology, it's good to have the experts here and the photo wizards too.
To summarize, I expected little and got lots, and am hoping for more ("aliens, Listy, aliens."(Red Dwarf))
Roy F
aka Reckless

Actually I do the same thing. When refering to the rovers I use 'we' as in 'us and them' - quite odd.

Doug

A little before the MER launches, KSC was holding a Nasa direct question and answer session streamed on the net. I sent two questions to them, one about the rover radios (this one got asked, which meant that I received a MER patch, sticker and pin). The other question was essentially "Is there any possibility that a rover might survive the Martian winter?". Basically I was looking for any bottom line survivability limits for the rovers, like the batteries were for Pathfinder. Unfortunately they didn't include this question in the session, maybe they thought it too far fetched :-).

But surviving two martian winters. I couldn't thought of that.

I remember being upset and depressed when I saw the nominal mission duration... 90 days. How could they send rovers to Mars and only design them to last 90 days!? I thought a short mission was inevitable due to dust buildup. Needless to say, my spirits have lifted since then.

I was expecting a lot less than what we've gotten. My sights were set on a nominal 90-day mission, rather like an enhanced Pathfinder/Sojourner mission. Then I lived a stop-at-a-time: first Eagle, then Endurance, then the Heatshield, and thence the journey south. Same thing with Spirit, although the initial part of the mission was travelling from the landing site to the Columbia Hills, with a side trip to Bonneville.

They will go as they go. And after they are gone, we'll still be working with their legacy: the data.

--Bill

I remember watching the landings live, and I'd hoped and expected that they'd do better than the Pathfinder lander did. I was discouraged seeing Spirit struggle with its software issues, but when they fixed it and when Oppy got going in the crater, I was just happy seeing day after day of success, hoping there'd be more days of great pics from Mars. I didn't expect THIS though In fact I remember one of the project managers saying the rovers would no longer be operational when the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter was scheduled to fly in 2005, during a televised press conference. Whoever said that's gotta be eating some delicious crow.

Initially I expected perhaps a 120 day mission. I thought mechanical failures, dust buildup, or getting stuck in the dunes (because the wheels are too small!) would've ended both missions earlier. I am very pleased we have made it this far, both rovers have far exceeded what I had thought possible.

I am hopeful we might even get another two earth years out of the rovers.

Hey Rob,
Any plans for an Imax documentary for MSL a la Roving Mars? I absolutely loved seeing those high-res pictures of the rover on that giant screen, and listening to the team's trials and tribulations through the project.

What about Nova and MER? I bought both of their MER videos, and would love to see a third followup with the "story until now", perhaps "A Thousand Martian Sunsets" would be a good working title.