Today we celebrate the tenth anniversary of the Martian rover Opportunity. Although Curiousity tends to get more press, Opportunity has been steadfastly sending back data from Mars since its landing near Yellowknife Bay on Gale Crater in 2004 - an astonishing record for a probe that was expected to last about 90 days.
Dusty, battered, and starting to suffer a bit from senility due to physical errors in its memory array, it's difficult to avoid anthropomorphizing the little fellow - one pictures a sort of Wall-E fascination with the minutiae of the Martian landscape*, or the kind of wistful dedication shown by the drones in Silent Running, faithful to the wishes of a distant master.
The ten year landmark offers an interesting opportunity (no pun intended) for NASA's long-term representative on Mars. According to Canadian law, after ten years the principle of adverse possession - more commonly known as squatter's rights - takes effect, allowing the inhabitant of a piece of property to claim ownership under the right circumstances. International space law forbids any sovereign nation to make such a claim, but there is no mention of individuals, electronic or otherwise, claiming a planet for themselves.
Personally, I rather like the idea of an American probe declaring independence and claiming Mars on behalf of itself and its fellow cybernetic explorers. Hopefully the United States government would support the decision - I think it would be mean-spirited of them to deny Opportunity the same chance for self-determination that their ancestors fought for in 1776.
- Sid
* If I was programming the AI for an extraterrestrial probe, I would want to somehow imbue it with the same combination of happiness, excitement, interest and respect that I feel whenever I travel to a foreign country.
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