Mr. Gorevan never finished work on his doctorate. "I'm just an overgrown kid who loves the space business," he said.

The scientists name not only every rock, but also separate locations on each rock that they examine. Earlier in the mission, true to the New York twist on this mission, the Honeybee engineers were able to assign the name New York to a grinding site on a rock named Mazatzal.

When the scientists wanted a deeper look into the rock, they changed the orientation of the grinding tool and renamed the site Brooklyn. "Somebody said it was the same target as New York but with an attitude adjustment," Mr. Bartlett said. (This being a scientific joke, it required a footnote: "'attitude,"' Mr. Bartlett said, "can mean angle or spacecraft pointing." On another rock, six targets were named TriBeCa, Little Italy, SoHo, Chelsea, Chinatown and West Village.

Honeybee started operating the rover remotely last month, and a couple of weeks ago they successfully sent, from NoLIta, commands for their first grinding of a rock named Uchben, the Mayan word for "ancient."

For the first nine months of the mission, scientists working on the project congregated at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory. But as the rovers continued strong, far past their original designed lifetime of three months, the scientists went back to their homes, and much of the rovers' operation is now handled remotely, via teleconference and the Internet.

The loss of the space shuttle Challenger in 1986 spurred greater emphasis on robotic missions. Honeybee won a contract to make fingers on a robotic arm for the space station, but that project was canceled. Under another NASA contract, Honeybee produced a prototype device that could drill into the ground to extract geological samples. That led to Honeybee building the drill for NASA's Champollion mission that was to land on a comet. Champollion was canceled, too.

Honeybee was also building the drill for a mission that was to bring Martian rocks back to Earth, but the loss of two NASA Mars missions in 1999 ended those plans as well. Instead, NASA built the two current Mars rovers.