Sol 800 coming up Options

[SFJCody]

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.

[dilo]

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...

[climber]

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 ?