Jesus dude, can’t you enjoy a crowning achievement of human and American excellence?

You think NASA is overly concerned about public perception to the tune 44x an original estimate?

Crazy sometimes human could be. But let us celebrate instead.

I celebrate the achievement just fine, it’s the horrible estimate that is shoved in my face constantly I have issues with. It represents a dumbing down of science for the masses that is just getting worse year after year that I resent. The rover isn’t good enough as is, we are told to be impressed by a nearly 50-fold wrong estimate that is all anyone knows about the rover. I knew it would be one of the top comments on this post. As a scientist I appreciate precision and good science, not hero worship and bureaucratic PR estimates.

Is it not acceptable that they were conservative in their predictions about the effects of Martian dust? I imagine they didn't have a whole lot of data points to inform their estimate.

I don't disagree with your overall point, but if you care about accuracy, you shouldn't also conflate an engineering goal with an estimation. I couldn't find the original estimation, but considering the unknowns we're talking about and the sunk costs, surely a 4-8x safety margin (1-2 years estimation) is not unreasonable. So we're at most talking about a 15-fold wrong estimation, not 50.

Another comment explained this. They set a goal of 90 days to get the data they needed. When they presented the proposal for budgetary approval, 90 days of data collection was considered worthwhile enough to greenlight the project. So they accomplished it. However once you already have a working rover on the surface you might as well operate it as long as it lasts because the marginal costs are minimal compared to the initial costs. So they kept requesting additional funding to keep the program running.

I see nothing wrong with this.

No one predicted that the rover would break on day 91. They designed it to last at least 90 days. Between standard rocket-science safty factors and preparing for the pessimistic end of all the uncertain risks, there is much room to go beyond your original mission.

Imagine you design a bridge to support 100 tons. No one would accuse you of mispredicting if it holds up at 200 tons. They will accuse you of negligence if it collapses at 105 tons.

If my retirement planner predicted that I had 90 days to live and I ended up living for another 15 years I imagine I'd be quite pleased.

It was never an estimate. It was the minimum plan.