Year on Mars

It's been a year since the first of the Mars Exploration Rovers landed on Mars, and they're both still going; in the meantime they managed to drive to some places that were significantly cooler-looking than their original landing sites. The site has a retrospective that includes some pictures you might have missed.

Mission scientists claim surprise, but this is pretty much par for planetary exploration missions: mission planning tends to be conservative enough that in most cases, either they fail early on, or they last several times the design lifetime. Mars Pathfinder was designed for a 30-day mission and kept going for about 90, with the limiting factor being the life of an internal battery.

But the rovers are far from setting an endurance record for a Mars lander mission: the 1970s Viking landers, relatively large spacecraft that were powered by plutonium RTGs and didn't move around, kept working for years. The fact that, over all that time, they transmitted home "over 1400 images" seems quaint today (the Galileo Jupiter probe couldn't do tremendously better in the 1990s, but that was because it was partly broken).

hair of the dog

Actually, you know what is a vicious earworm? This proto-version of "Drugs". I never thought of this song as catchy—the album version is kind of disturbing; Nancy Reagan could have used it—but something about the stereo-ping-pong guitar hook in this concert version from like 1978 just sticks in your head and won't come out.