My kitty, Keelor, is still going strong at 17 (knock on wood). He came from a litter of four, one of whom died when he was only a few months old. His sister was euthanized just last year at 16, but his other brother died at a relatively young age (around 10, if I remember correctly) from necrotizing pancreatitis.
X-band radio waves used by the rover to communicate. The rover communicates with the orbiters and the DSN through radio waves. They communicate with each other through X-band, which are radio waves at a much higher frequency than radio waves used for FM stations. Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech.
The spacecraft mainly talk via UHF. The data rate direct-to-Earth varies from about 500 bits per second to 32,000 bits per second. The data rate to the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter can be as high as 2 million bits per second. The data rate to the Odyssey orbiter is 128,000 or 256,000 bits per second. An orbiter passes over the rover and is in the vicinity of the sky to communicate for about eight minutes at a time, per Martian day.