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| Mars Rovers |
 Title text: I just Googled 'roomba sojourner mod' and was sorely disappointed. Be the change, I guess! |
Explanation
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This explanation may be incomplete or incorrect: Created by a CUTE ROBOT. Please mention here why this explanation isn't complete. Do NOT delete this tag too soon. |
This article is Randall's placement of the various Mars rovers on a cuteness versus capabilities chart.
He finds the Curiosity and Perseverance rovers to be very capable / useful, but not very cute. Spirit and Opportunity are cuter than the first two, but less capable. The recently launched Perseverance rover contains a drone helicopter, Ingenuity, which Randall finds very cute, but he is unsure how capable / useful it is. The way the error-range is indicated 'coincidentally' gives the Ingenuity image-plot a sense of movement in mid-air, especially the up and down motion which is the helicopter's (hopefully) most obvious dynamic once it is deployed and being tested.
Finally, on the very right of the chart is the Sojourner rover, launched in 1997. He considers this rover extremely cute, but ultimately not that capable in terms of space exploration.
In the title text, Randall is disappointed that there aren't many people who have modified their Roomba vacuums to look like (or act like?) the Soujourner rover. Results at the time of posting are mainly reports mentioning the iRobot company, since one of its founders worked on the Soujourner rover.
Roomba has been mentioned in many xkcd comics.
The cuteness of Sojourner has been mentioned before in 1585: Similarities.
Transcript
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This transcript is incomplete. Please help editing it! Thanks. |
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