THIS IS COOL:

Those “never say die” robots on Mars — NASA’s Spirit and Opportunity — continue to chalk up science at their respective exploration sites.

Looming large for the Opportunity rover at Meridiani Planum is Victoria Crater — a grand bit of territory that’s roughly half a mile (800 meters) in diameter. That’s about six times wider than Endurance Crater, a feature that the rover previously surveyed for several months in 2004, gathering data on rock layers there that were affected by water of long, long ago. . . .

“All of the cameras continue to work remarkably well and are continuing to acquire beautiful images,” said Cornell astronomer Jim Bell, the panoramic camera payload element lead for the Mars Exploration Rovers. “They have proven to be extremely robust to the extreme conditions on the Martian surface … large temperature swings, fine dust everywhere, large cosmic ray flux,” he told Space.com.

Since the twin rovers independently landed on Mars in January 2004, Spirit’s cameras have taken about 82,000 pictures. Opportunity has taken about 71,500 pictures, for a combined downlinked image data volume of about 19 gigabytes. About 54,400 of Spirit’s images and 49,500 of Opportunity’s are high-resolution panoramic images, Bell said.

It’s always nice when things work better than expected.