“My battery is low and it's getting dark”

The Mars Exploration Rover Opportunity operated on Mars from 2004 until it was disabled by a dust storm in 2018. Its demise was declared in February 2019 after months of unsuccessful recontact attempts by scientists at the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA). This announcement sparked a global outpouring of grief that demonstrated people understood and related to the robot in a notably human-like manner. In short, it had been given a collectively understood persona. This paper presents a study of 100 digital postcards created by users on a NASA website that demonstrate the ways in which people expressed love, grief, hope, and thanks for Opportunity’s fourteen years of operation on another planet. In presenting this case study, the paper argues that certain personas are collective achievements. This is especially likely to occur for robots and other inanimate objects which have no centrally controlled or developed persona. The paper is situated within existing persona studies literature to extend and stretch the definition of persona studies and therefore expand the field in productive ways to incorporate the study of non-human personas.

DeepLabV3+/Efficientnet Hybrid Network-Based Scene Area Judgment for the Mars Unmanned Vehicle System

Due to the complexity and danger of Mars’s environment, traditional Mars unmanned ground vehicles cannot efficiently perform Mars exploration missions. To solve this problem, the DeepLabV3+/Efficientnet hybrid network is proposed and applied to the scene area judgment for the Mars unmanned vehicle system. Firstly, DeepLabV3+ is used to extract the feature information of the Mars image due to its high accuracy. Then, the feature information is used as the input for Efficientnet, and the categories of scene areas are obtained, including safe area, report area, and dangerous area. Finally, according to three categories, the Mars unmanned vehicle system performs three operations: pass, report, and send. Experimental results show the effectiveness of the DeepLabV3+/Efficientnet hybrid network in the scene area judgment. Compared with the Efficientnet network, the accuracy of the DeepLabV3+/Efficientnet hybrid network is improved by approximately 18% and reaches 99.84%, which ensures the safety of the exploration mission for the Mars unmanned vehicle system.

Mars: new insights and unresolved questions

Mars exploration motivates the search for extraterrestrial life, the development of space technologies, and the design of human missions and habitations. Here, we seek new insights and pose unresolved questions relating to the natural history of Mars, habitability, robotic and human exploration, planetary protection, and the impacts on human society. Key observations and findings include: – high escape rates of early Mars' atmosphere, including loss of water, impact present-day habitability; – putative fossils on Mars will likely be ambiguous biomarkers for life; – microbial contamination resulting from human habitation is unavoidable; and – based on Mars' current planetary protection category, robotic payload(s) should characterize the local martian environment for any life-forms prior to human habitation. Some of the outstanding questions are: – which interpretation of the hemispheric dichotomy of the planet is correct; – to what degree did deep-penetrating faults transport subsurface liquids to Mars' surface; – in what abundance are carbonates formed by atmospheric processes; – what properties of martian meteorites could be used to constrain their source locations; – the origin(s) of organic macromolecules; – was/is Mars inhabited; – how can missions designed to uncover microbial activity in the subsurface eliminate potential false positives caused by microbial contaminants from Earth; – how can we ensure that humans and microbes form a stable and benign biosphere; and – should humans relate to putative extraterrestrial life from a biocentric viewpoint (preservation of all biology), or anthropocentric viewpoint of expanding habitation of space? Studies of Mars' evolution can shed light on the habitability of extrasolar planets. In addition, Mars exploration can drive future policy developments and confirm (or put into question) the feasibility and/or extent of human habitability of space.