Spacecraft Set to Reach Milestone, Reports Technical Glitches Options

[Jim from NSF.com]

Imagine the kind of spares lying around from military reconnaissance satellites and what the planetary exploration community could do with them. Oh, those selfish, selfish generals!

Not the same. There is a "production line" for reconsats. Not the same as one time only planetary spacecraft. They would probably use the hardware on the last bird in the series or even put together another vehicle (which had been done before)

[Jim from NSF.com]

If I remember correctly, the reason the two spacecraft share the same frequency is that MRO uses a spare X-band communications transponder left over from the Mars Rover program, identical to the transponder on Spirit, and it never occurred to anyone that Spirit would still be roving when MRO began operations in orbit around Mars.
TTT

that is correct

[tty]

Not the same. There is a "production line" for reconsats. Not the same as one time only planetary spacecraft. They would probably use the hardware on the last bird in the series or even put together another vehicle (which had been done before)

As I remember it they had a very hard time finding enough hardware left over at the end of the Corona program to cobble together a satellite for display purposes, and that was after 100+ launches. Essentailly all the test and development hardware had been upgraded to flyable status and launched.

[remcook]

http://www.spaceflightnow.com/news/n0708/26mro/

"Alfred McEwen of the University of Arizona, Tucson, principal investigator for the camera, said, "I'm happy to report that there has been no detectable degradation over the past five months." "

"McEwen said, "Given the stability we've seen and understanding the nature of the problem, we now expect HiRISE to return high-quality data for years to come." "

yay!