Every once in a while I wander over to the NASA page on the Mars rovers. You probably remember those guys - six-wheeled semi-autonomous robots we sent off to Mars several years ago, figuring they'd run for three months before the Martian environment killed them off. Well, they're still running around on the red planet, five years after their three-month warranty ran out, and I'm frequently amazed by that. When Mars and Earth are on the same side of the sun, 50 million miles separate them. Read that again: 50,000,000 miles, when the planets are close to each other.
Mars's temperature averages about -60 C, or -81 F. That's cold. There's little, if any, oxygen (though I suppose that helps prevent corrosion), and dust storms are fairly frequent, which is a problem if you're solar-powered (as the rovers are). And these guys are still running.
And then I think about the Voyager spacecraft. The Voyagers, who were launched when JFK was president, are each now over 8 Billion miles away - that's billion with a b (Voyager 1 is 9.9 Billion miles away). And they're still collecting and sending data back, and still fueling discoveries.
Wow.
Mars Rovers: http://marsrovers.nasa.gov/home/index.html
Voyagers Spacecraft: http://voyager.jpl.nasa.gov/index.html
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