The Phoenix has landed... but the dust has not cleared
It’s another beautiful day in the Mojave, temps will easily pass
the century mark, and there will be another batch of emails with
various questions and "trolling" remarks about what exactly is or is
not on Mars and how badly crippled it is.
So far, among the letters from the public, I’ve received claims of:
"it’s an Apollo moon-shot fake, like the rovers", there’s a short in
the robot arm, the robot arm is broken, the lander leaked ‘rocket
fuel’, the OS crashed the lander and it’s not responding, the lander
runs Linux, the lander runs embedded Windows, the lander has a modern
computer and uses 128MB of RAM.
Okay. I’ll go through these to see if I can help clear some of the dust.