Rover as Member: Collaborating Rather Than Controlling Technology

Author:

• Zara Mirmalek (Univ of California, San Diego)

Abstract:

I examine the ways in which the remotely operated space vehicles, the rovers, on NASA's Mars Exploration Rovers mission were culturally constituted as collaborators through discourse and work practice. During the mission, scientists and engineers anthropomorphized the rovers with human characteristics of kinship, agency, emotion, and appendages. I consider this relationship of rovers as collaborators rather than tools and its implications through ethnographic evidence of the simulations and actual operations of the mission.