I thought the Niburu people from PlanetX that reside on Mars juiced the 
batteries and cleaned the solar panels. ;-)

<thad@thadlabs.com> wrote in message 
news:1111560424.006284.133350@l41g2000cwc.googlegroups.com...

canopus56 wrote:

Is there an analogous problem with the Mars rovers?  Since they have

a

useful life far beyond their design life, at what point should the

plug

be pulled for budgetary reasons?  (Of course I am in favor of running
them until they fail regardless of the cost. -:) )

"Problem"?  Heck no, even the Martians are helping us out by cleaning
the
solar panels on, for example, Spirit, and juicing the batteries for
extra-
long life as reported at URL:

<http://antwrp.gsfc.nasa.gov/apod/>

for Wednesday, 2005 March 23.

The ONLY time to "pull the plug" on the Rovers is if they should
spin-out
on the ice and crash into the side of one of the canals.

:-)