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.
Mars is so far away in fact that it takes radio signals quite a long time to get from the spacecraft back to Earth. During Curiosity EDL, this delay will be 13 minutes, 48 seconds, about mid-way between the minimum delay of around 4 minutes and the maximum of around 24 minutes. This makes it a challenge to operate Mars Express because it's hard to have a conversation with the spacecraft, or react if anything happens on board.