[−]ButlerianJihad · 2026-08-30 Sun 12:40 UTC ·
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They have often indeed made “flight spare” copies of the main instruments.
When I worked for Mars Global Surveyor, one of the museum-pieces in the lobby was a glass case with the Viking spectrometer flight spare.
The flight spares were exceedingly useful when the spacecraft had some kind of trouble during its mission, because you could mock-up the flight spare in a lab and replicate many situations very closely, and propose solutions based on the mockups.
When I worked for Mars Global Surveyor, one of the museum-pieces in the lobby was a glass case with the Viking spectrometer flight spare.
The flight spares were exceedingly useful when the spacecraft had some kind of trouble during its mission, because you could mock-up the flight spare in a lab and replicate many situations very closely, and propose solutions based on the mockups.