New Uses For Old Equipment

I love to retask or use parts from broken machines. They are already paid for, you reduce the amount of garbage created, I get to work with my hands and brain and there's a soulful warmth knowing that you're getting over on the planned obsolesce or shoddy workmanship of much of what is available.

So I was quite pleased to read about NASA's plan to use the Spirit rover currently stuck in the sand to study Mars orbit and the composition of it's core. The engineer who came up with this idea should be given a bonus or at least new Sears Dog Bone.

This is another example of clearly useful science being produced at at very cheap price, a hallmark of NASA's unmanned programs.