What did you expect?, The day they landed, what did you expect the MERs to achieve? Options

[Stu]

Having survived two years on Mars, obviously both MERs have succeeded beyond our wildest dreams... but I'm curious. What did everyone expect/hope them to go on to achieve on those heady landing days? How far did you think they'd get? What did you think would be their "best picture"? How long did you think they'd survive?

Might be interesting to compare our hopes and dreams with the reality...

[Stu]

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.