“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.

Distributed Cognition and the Experience of Presence in the Mars Exploration Rover Mission

Although research on presence in virtual environments has increased in the last few decades due to the rise of immersive technologies, it has not examined how it is achieved in distributed cognitive systems. To this end, we examine the sense of presence on the Martian landscape experienced by scientific team members in the Mars Exploration Rover (MER) mission (2004–2018). How this was achieved is not obvious because the sensorimotor coupling that typically underlies presence in mundane situations was absent. Nonetheless, we argue that the Three-Level model can provide a framework for exploring how presence was achieved. This account distinguishes between proto-presence, core-presence, and extended-presence, each level dependent on being able to respond effectively to affordances at a particular level of abstraction, operating at different timescales. We maintain that scientists' sense of presence on Mars involved core-presence and extended-presence rather than proto-presence. Extended-presence involved successfully establishing distal intentions (D-intentions) during strategic planning, i.e., long term conceptual goals. Core-presence involved successfully enacting proximal intentions (P-intentions) during tactical planning by carrying out specific actions on a particular target, abstracting away from sensorimotor details. This was made possible by team members “becoming the rover,” which enhanced their ability to identify relevant affordances revealed through images. We argue, however, that because Mars exploration is a collective activity involving shared agency by a distributed cognitive system, the experience of presence was a collective presence of the team through the rover.

Sedimentation and Proposed Algorithms to Detect the Possible Existence of Vegetation and Humidity in the Landing Area of the Mars Exploration Rover-B (Opportunity)

Opportunity was launched in 2004 and has been providing interesting data from Mars till 2018. Meridiani Planum was the landing site for the robot. This crater has numerous rock outcrops, which are considered a valuable geological resource that contains keys to the Martian past. In this work, several algorithms have been developed for detecting the possible presence of humidity and vegetation on Mars through the images sent by the Mars Exploration Rover - B Opportunity and by the Viking Orbiter between 1976 and 1980. For this, it was carried out a sedimentary simulation of the study area, as well as an analysis of all the images from the spectral signatures extracted. The results show the existence of three types of water on the surface, as well as concentrations of Neoxanthin, also on landing area surface, that suggest the possible existence of microalgae.

Draft Genome Sequences of Bacillus glennii V44-8, Bacillus saganii V47-23a, Bacillus sp. Strain V59.32b, Bacillus sp. Strain MER_TA_151, and Paenibacillus sp. Strain MER_111, Isolated from Cleanrooms Where the Viking and Mars Exploration Rover Spacecraft Were Assembled

ABSTRACT We report the draft genome sequences of Bacillus glennii V44-8, Bacillus saganii V47-23a, and Bacillus sp. strain V59.32b, isolated from the Viking spacecraft assembly cleanroom, and Bacillus sp. strain MER_TA_151 and Paenibacillus sp. strain MER_111, isolated from the Mars Exploration Rover (MER) assembly cleanroom.