Mars Probe May Have Spotted Sojourner Rover

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."

Re:Rovers are signs of intelligent life!

[MyHair]

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.

Can anyone make out the pic details?

[192939495969798999]

My eyes and monitor are good, but I can't tell what the labels are to. Couldn't anyone draw a line to whatever the item is that they think is the rover? I'm just not seeing it at all. It's like where's Waldo in black and white but with a much, much smaller Waldo.

Re:wow, this is actually kind of sad....

[rcatarella]

Robots hate to be anthropomorphized ;)

Re:Viking landers

[abigor]

Fully agreed, I have long been a proponent of nuclear power - I can remember talking about this nearly 10 years ago, and not just for powerplants in spacecraft, but also as the real answer to air quality issues, foreign oil dependence, and so forth. To be honest, there is a significant number of enviro types who are pro-nuclear, but they tend to be in the rationalist camp. The emotional camp, always the larger and more vocal of the two, consistently drowns out the rationalists in any debate.

It was such emotional arguments that cancelled the U.S. Integral Fast Reactor back in the '90s (I think it was), and has retarded the deployment of reactors in general all over the place in favour of coal, etc.