This image is from NASA's Mars Rover Sojourner which landed on Mars on July 4, 1997. Perhaps not noticable at first, the Sojourner rover is parked up against the big rock on the right side of the image. In the movie The Martian, Mark Watney (played by Matt Damon) kept this little rover as a pet. The movie was fiction, but the rover is real.

I have this on my page because I am fascinated by space exploration, and this little rover represented a milestone in robotics. It was small, cheap (relatively speaking), and most importantly, it worked.

Mars robots have been a remarkable series of successes. Expected to last only 90 days each, Opportunity drove around for almost 15 years and Curiosity drove around for almost 12 years. The little helicopter named Ingenuity was expected to make 5 flights, but it actually flew 72 missions. Given that Mars' atmosphere is less than 1% of Earth's, it is a remarkable feat to even fly at all. That little guy was an overachiever.

Millions of things have to go right for space exploration success, but only one thing has to go wrong to achieve a spectacular failure.