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

Natallia Valadzko

“I am safe on Mars” is not something you’d expect to see on your Twitter feed without thinking it was a brand-new trend or a meme. And yet it was the update posted by the account for NASA’s Perseverance rover (@NASAPersevere) after it made its final descent to the Red Planet on 18th Feb 2021. Thousands of people were glued to their screens watching the countdown broadcast or reading the live commentary i n anticipation of a successful landing. Up until today, Perseverance tweets in the firstperson, keeping people updated with its exploits: photography, collecting rocks, and off-roading, which are even listed as its “hobbies” in its Twitter bio.

But how did we get here – or more precisely – there? Since the 1970s, scientists have been sending spacecraft to Mars, all of which have different specialties. For example, orbiters fly around Mars collecting data on the weather and mapping; landers would perform experiments as far as their robotic arms would allow; and rovers have wheels and specialise in moving around. The goals of NASA’s Mars Exploration program have been determining whether life ever arose on Mars, characterising the planet’s climate and geology, and preparing for human exploration. Perseverance is the fifth rover on Mars. But perhaps Opportunity, or Oppy, has proved to be the most renowned so far.

Opportunity and Spirit, often referred to as brothers or twins, were launched in 2003 to land on Mars to traverse the Red Planet in search of signs of past life. The mission was planned to last 90 days. To everybody’s enormous surprise, the rover’s activity has far outlasted this period, reaching 14 years of operating on Mars. The Opportunity rover stopped communicating with Earth when a severe Mars-wide dust storm blanketed its location in June 2018. After more than a thousand commands to restore contact, engineers made their last attempt to revive Opportunity in February, 2019, but to no avail. One journalist tweeted his translation of the last data transmission sent by Opportunity in June 2018, as “My battery is low and it’s getting dark”. The phrase struck a chord with the public, inspiring a period of mourning, artwork, and tributes to the memory of Opportunity. Among such poetic tributes are odes, elegies, an anonymous “eulogy”, and lyric poems – either addressed to Opportunity or written from its perspective.

While reading these pieces, one is inevitably bound to experience a mix of emotions ranging from guilt to empathy and wonder about the relationship between humanity and a highly personified unmanned spacecraft. In these texts, the Mars rover is often described to be feeling frail, faint and cold. The sensory (and emotional) experience of a human gets attributed to Opportunity. It makes one think if we are even able to come up with the vocabulary to describe the experience of a machine but do so not in a human-centric way.

John Updike’s poem “Duet on Mars” is written from the rover’s point of view. Opportunity’s utterance “They send me to see / These dreary rocks” is an example of this anthropomorphic language to talk of the rover’s 23 cameras, which serve a myriad of purposes – from navigation and hazard avoidance to identification of chemical elements. Not only does it “see” but it also speaks about seeing, which makes the image of a Mars rover even more human-like.

Similarly, an elegy by Courtney Tala alludes to Opportunity’s hearing in the lines “Did you hear? / Did you recognize each clever lyric?” The lyric mentioned actually refers to the last message NASA sent to Opportunity, which was Billie Holiday’s song “I’ll Be Seeing You”, as a tribute to the “dead” rover. Whatever the rover is receiving or sending cannot be easily called seeing, hearing or recognizing, as in fact we are taking a conceptual shortcut to what is truly happening with raw data.

“Because we could not go for them, they went for us” reads the eulogy, which calls Mars rovers “our eyes and hands” as they extend our reach to the Martian surface. The eulogy imagines a time when humans will be able to travel to Mars and offers an apology for not having come sooner. This sense of sentimental urgency makes one think of a human-machine entanglement, where leaving a part of oneself alone, deserted on an empty planet seems to require an apology. Another curious description is that of rovers as “our children”. The eulogy’s opening goes, “We sent our children up into the sky without expecting to see them again and gave them the most beautiful names.” And yet, who would send vulnerable children ahead, towards apparent danger and hostility? Does this mean that we project attributes selectively? Then why children? One might argue that it would only come as close as the relationship of the creator-creation: we built them, so they are our “children”.

Looking ahead, we can only imagine what will happen to the bodies of numerous “dead” rovers when humans are finally sent to Mars. With Oppy in mind, will they perhaps be pronounced dead and buried, thus making us rethink what really counts as “death”? And if so, should we start treating a box of our old mobiles as a techno-cemetery? Or will they become historical monuments as “explorers”, be avoided as garbage piles on the outskirts of human life or perhaps harvested to build new objects? As for now, all eyes are on Perseverance.