That story is very much over sold. They defiantly designed the things with a longer lifespan in mind. NASA simply had more reasonable minimum specks so if they died on day 220 nobody would call the program a failure.
A group of engineers put a working robot on a moving object 140 million miles away, and that robot trucked along for fourteen years.
I honestly do not see any aspect of this which is not totally and completely astonishing, marvelous, and awe-inspiring.
Distance makes little difference past the first day. Doing the same thing on the moon would not be easier becase it’s closer. It’s local conditions that make this hard more so than simply getting to that point.
I think the book "Roving Mars" covers this the best. They were worried about a dust storm like the one that killed Opportunity, so they designed the rover to last 90 days even in the pitch darkness of a dust storm. To make sure they'd succeed even in this worst case, they added two additional petals worth of solar panels (IIRC, about a 50% increase in area) to the MERs.
Reading a contemporary description, they seemed to be very scared they wouldn't make the 90 days - hence this major and risky redesign. (The new panels had to open, and if one failed it would block off both the new solar panel, and one of the original ones.)
It worked, and so they had enough extra power to last through that first Martian year, where the winds blew the panels clean. And the rest is history.
There is no chance anyone involved in that program expected the rover to last for 5 years, let alone 15.
90 days was because they didn't think a rover would last over 90 days due to dust storms. They figured that after 90 days they'd encounter a bad dust storm that would cover the solar panels and make them unable to collect power, and thus the battery would be drained and unable to charge after 90 days.
They didn't account that the winds on mars would be able to clean the solar dust off the solar cells so well that it turned out dust storms weren't a huge issue until the latest one.
And from my understanding it wasn't the intensity of the latest storm that killed it but the part of the rover's computer that kept track of time was shot, so it wasn't able to optimize when to go to sleep and when to wake up properly, causing it to run out of charge while it was dark.
Nah, it's a method for giving you a lot of wiggle room if you (or your business) fucks up in something.
NSF, too. The VLA opened in 1978 and the first data recorded by it can be reduced by the current radio astronomy analysis software. In fact the software data format developed for the VLA (FITS) is now popular with high-end camera people... 41 years later.
So, did he make it beyond Pluto or not?