On January 24, 2010, NASA's Opportunity rover begins its sixth Earth year of exploring the surface of Mars. Opportunity has covered more than 11 miles and returned more than 132,000 images of the Red Planet. Its twin Spirit rover arrived on the opposite side of Mars on January 3, 2004, and thus has already celebrated its sixth anniversary there, albeit recently bogged down in a sand trap.
These two Mars rovers had design goals of functioning for 90 days. Their actual longevity works out to a bit more than 24 times this anticipated usefulness (6 x 365.2/90 = 24.3). Proportionately, it's like your 2010 new car—its design life, say 10 years/150,000 miles—still running in the year 2253.
Purely as an aside, years ago in April 1993, we tested an earlier version—a "vintage" model?—of the Mars rover.
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