The "Mission facts" links on the right sidebar are all good reads.
Think about all the areas of knowledge needed to get that rover there: aerospace, math, material sciences, mechanics, software, geology, communications... Must be fun to work at NASA.
Fun tidbits:
Each airbag has double bladders to support impact pressure and, to protect the bladders from sharp rocks, six layers of a special cloth woven from polymer fiber that is five times stronger than steel. The fiber material, Vectran, is used in the strings of archery bows and tennis racquets.Dealing with temperature:
Batteries and other components that are not designed to survive cold martian nights reside in the warm electronics box. Nighttime temperatures may fall as low as minus 105 C (minus 157 F). The batteries need to be kept above minus 20 C (minus 4 F) for when they are supplying power, and above 0 C (32 F) when being recharged. Heat inside the warm electronics box comes from a combination of electrical heaters, eight radioisotope heater units and heat given off by electronics components.Slow, reliable computers:
The computer in each Mars Exploration Rover runs with a 32-bit Rad 6000 microprocessor, a radiation-hardened version of the PowerPC chip used in some models of Macintosh computers, operating at a speed of 20 million instructions per second. Onboard memory includes 128 megabytes of random access memory, augmented by 256 megabytes of flash memory and smaller amounts of other non-volatile memory, which allows the system to retain data even without power.Water:
"Gusev is a big hole in the ground, a crater, and it's got this huge dried up river bed flowing into it," Squyres said. "Now if you can come up with an explanation that says there wasn't a lake there, I'd like to hear it. I mean it was water and it flowed into a hole in the ground.
