I am sad now. Thank you.
I’m always amazed at how efficient us humans are at making me feel sorry for a cartoon robot!
I always liked the extended version:
If you think this is sad you should hear what happened to Sojourner, our first Mars rover. If it lost contact with the base station it was programmed to drive around to hopefully get line of sight so it can keep doing science.
However, the base station - Mars Pathfinder - failed first. Scientists didn’t know what happened to them until the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter got detailed shots of the landing site. There were far, far more tracks from Sojourner than expected.
So this poor little robot was driving around and around, trying to get back in contact with NASA because it had more science for us, until it too died.
