Even though a bit of luck and the astonishing talents of their ground crews could pull out a few more months of travel and science from these amazing machines, if you've been following their actions daily, you can sense that the failures are starting to overwhelm the successes.

It has to be getting near the point where the hassle of dealing with all the daily problems just becomes too much for what has to be a slowly dwindling budget.

They've put Opportunity on a long distance voyage to a huge crater but little glitches in wheel currents are causing more days sitting around than moving. At this pace they'll never get there before something really nails them.

Spirit may get itself out of this latest bog but dragging that dead wheel limits it to driving in spots that just are not that interesting.

We'll have another dust storm. I can't imagine JPL staff having to wait through another without drastically cutting staffing levels. Those people need to find steady work on projects that they can count on being there for the long haul.

My prediction is the rovers have maybe a few more months of support left and then the program will begin shutting down. They'll go into an end-mission mode where they'll look in every few months to see levels of dust accumulation and weather conditions but the roving days will be over.

Art