Quotes from Steve Squyres

These rovers are living on borrowed time. We're so past warranty on them. You try to push them hard every day because we're living day to day.

I want to make as many people as possible feel like they are part of this adventure. We are going to give everybody a sense of what exploring the surface of another world is really like.

After a short discussion, the conclusion is to dust off the old SHUTDOWN_DAMMIT command that we used to use when things went to hell back during thermal vac. SHUTDOWN_DAMMIT should shut things down cold and should prevent any comm windows from opening up until the commanded wake-up time, which won't be until tomorrow morning.

Worst of all was the flight software that handled data on board the rover, writing to and reading from the "flash" memory that was our equivalent of a computer's hard drive. The read and write commands too often just didn't work. The command we seemed to use the most was the one the Flight Software team called "SHUTDOWN_DAMMIT", which was like hitting CTRL-ALT-DEL on a personal computer, killing everything off and starting over.

Over the course of ATLO, we had powered up the transponders that we use in each rover to transmit data to Earth about six hundred times. All but two of those times they had worked. But on each rover, just once, the transponder had refused to send any data when it came up. The two times this had happened, the ATLO guys had done what anybody does when their expensive high-tech hardware doesn't work: They turned it off and turned it back on again.

So on every space project, there is a tension: the idealistic, impractical scientists against the stubborn, practical engineers. On the good projects, it's a creative tension that draws out the strengths of both disciplines. On the really bad ones, it's an acid that eats away at the collaboration until it's rotten.