Yep, another nice round number to celebrate. 'Course, this one is slightly bittersweet now that Spirit has lost some mobility. But I remain optimistic that as Spirit crawls slowly through the dust towards McCool Hill, a tiny metallic chip will get lodged somewhere in the inner workings of the wheel and repair the open connection. We can but hope.
Frankly, I am a little bit worried by Spirit mobility/energy issues, so I do not want to celebrate Sol800 unless she is in a safer position...
You're right, I do have a strange mood too.
Anyway, don't forget the following. On April 13th three new milestones will be achieved :
1-Spirit will have lived 9 times her schedulled live.
2-Cost per SOL for any one of the Rovers will go under 500.000 USD***
3-We've got just over 150.000 pictures. Here you can see some data I collected from October 2004 when we get to 50.000 pics.
Pics N° Date Day diff Pic/Sol
50.000 12/10/04 543 92
75.000 28/03/05 167 75
100.000 19/07/05 113 111
125.000 27/10/05 100 125
150 000 01/04/06 156 80
*** Steve Squyres once wrote that, at the bigining of the operations , the big issue was trying not to screw up any SOL since cost per sol was 4 million USD! Now, if you consider the mission cost at 800 Millions USD (I know, it has rosen since, but well, it will just push back the real date by a few tens of Sols) a simple calculation give you 800M/1600Sols = 0.5 M/Sol.
Does any one have a recent figure of the REAL total cost of the mission by now ?
Good point - I'd totally forgotten to factor them in
Doug
Well, pathfinder get Sojourner + Carl Sagan's station too
Sojourner was $25m over and above Pathfinder iirc, which at 84 sols as well, is $297k/sol - but would have been approx $3.5m/sol over it's nominal 7 day mission
Doug
I dont have the numbers at the moment,
but how about Marineer 4, 6, 7, 9
and MGS, MO, MEX and the new MRO
ken
TODAY, 2006 April 3, is SOL 800
despite the wheel, lets celebrate
Thanks for the statistics, climber et al.
In addition to figure out the cost/Sol of each mission, we should also consider quality and quantity of data transmitted to Earth!
Obviously, thanks to unparalleled mobility and newer technology, MER is for sure well above all the others... do someone knows how many bits were returned by each mission?
PS: about Sol800, maybe we could celebrate it if Sol799Sol small movement will continue...
I have a different way to do the MER maths...
150,000 images
$900M
$6000 per image.
Some people pay more than that for a bad piece of art work
Doug
You're right, but you'd better like "calibration-target-sundial's" pictures!
I do
Doug
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