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Mars Probe May Have Spotted Sojourner Rover

Posted by ryuzaki0 on from the born-free-as-free-as-the-wind-blows dept.

Maggie McKee writes "NASA's eagle-eyed Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter may have spotted the tiny, toaster oven-sized Sojourner rover just a few meters away from its companion, the Mars Pathfinder lander. It appears to have crawled there in an attempt to re-establish contact with the lander after the lander had already died. But the pictures aren't clear enough to definitively ID the rover, and it's possible Sojourner simply took off on its own. If it were miraculously still alive after 10 years, it could be 3 kilometers away from Pathfinder — and probably impossible to find, even with MRO."

7 of 149 comments (clear)

  1. Rover by master_kaos · · Score: 5, Funny

    Red Rover, Red Rover, Let Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter Come Over

  2. HTML version of Sojourner pic by PeeAitchPee · · Score: 5, Funny

    .

    ;-)

  3. Rovers are signs of intelligent life! by BubbaFett · · Score: 5, Funny

    Is Mars so boring now that we're just sending things there to look at other things we've sent there?

    1. Re:Rovers are signs of intelligent life! by MyHair · · Score: 5, Insightful

      From TA I gather they wanted to see what Sojourner did after losing contact...how did its programming to return to base play out?

      I'm guessing it's also a sanity check of several factors.

      Plus it's nifty cool!

      Lastly, perhaps seeing how various known objects appear on the images will help them look for crash sites like Beagle's. MPL presumably is flying through space somewhere, but if they weren't confident of that they could look for its crash site, too.

      Even more lastly it's probably interesting to see how the weather affects conditions around long-sitting known objects. Do dunes build up? Do they get dusty or does the wind clean them? Etc.

  4. wow, this is actually kind of sad.... by mdm-adph · · Score: 5, Funny

    ...in a dorky kind of way.

    --
    It is by my will alone my thoughts acquire motion; it is by the juice of the coffee bean that the thoughts acquire speed
  5. *Much* better pictures on NASA site by ashitaka · · Score: 5, Informative

    There is a collection of much higher resolution pictures on the NASA site to the point you can see the ramps on the lander.

    It is difficult to see whether the sojurner rover is nearby or not. The programming was set to make it do so but I like the thought of an intrepid little robot setting off on it's own.

    "It's a magical world, Hobbes old buddy. Let's go exploring"

    --
    If you don't want to repeat the past, stop living in it.
  6. Re:Callous and heartless by Tablizer · · Score: 5, Funny

    Poor Sojourner was left to wander around with no means of communicating back home, while dying a slow and lonely death.

    It will meet up with Spirit and together they will party and have children. They are the Adam and Eve of Mars. 6000 years from now billions of robots will read about them in Genesis of the Mars Bible. But the Mars evolutionists will insist Sojourner evolved from toasters and staplers instead of having a Creator (JPL).

    --
    Table-ized A.I.