The Martian is one of my favorite books of all time, but I will never forgive Andy Weir for failing to explain whatever happened to Sojourner.
Astronaut Mark Watney is stranded on Mars with no way of communicating with Earth, so he ventures hundreds of miles away from his base camp to find the old Pathfinder lander and jerry-rig it back to life; he takes the probe back to camp along with the diminutive Sojourner rover in the hopes that he can use its many moving parts to communicate with NASA once he gets the probe’s camera up and running. He fixes Pathfinder easily enough by plugging it into the hab’s power source, but Sojourner battery is completely dead and he can’t use it. After that, we never know what he does with the rover!
Does he keep it in the hab? I would expect Sojoruner to become his Wilson volleyball, but we’re never told! Does he take it outside and “set it free” back on the surface? Does he leave it with Pathfinder when he finally departs from the hab? Does he bury it like a lost pet? I would become emotionally attached to it, it’s so small and historically significant, I couldn’t just chuck it out like a broken microwave.
What happens to Sojourner?!?
