A Rover's Story

Warga’s fictional Resilience rover is based mainly on the real-life Perseverance rover, albeit she took some inspiration from the Curiosity rover as well. Perseverance launched on its Mars 2020 mission on July 30, 2020. Its mission, like that of Resilience, involved collecting soil and rock samples that it could potentially bring back to Earth for further study. After a seven-month journey, Perseverance landed on Mars on February 18, 2021, in the Jezero Crater, which scientists at NASA have determined holds great potential for yielding evidence of past life on Mars. In some Slavic languages, jezero means “lake”; this name is appropriate, as the crater’s rich clay and mineral deposits suggest it once held water. This crater was also the landing site for the fictional Resilience.

Resilience shares many similarities with its real-world counterpart. Like Perseverance, Resilience is equipped with a chemical laboratory, over 20 cameras, and a mechanical arm outfitted with a drill and other tools. Resilience also went through many of the same tests as Perseverance before embarking on its mission, including ones for terrain and temperature. To enhance Resilience’s experiences in the lab, Warga added some additional details, such as the Shake and Bake test. Normally, only the test rover (Journey, in the novel’s case) would undergo this test, but Warga used the test in the narrative to build Resilience’s personality and show the rover developing the emotion of fear. Warga also took liberties with Resilience’s Mars mission. Like Perseverance, Resilience collected and analyzed soil and rock samples, but Resilience’s mission to bring another rover online was fabricated for the novel in order to further explore the human condition.

Warga also used Perseverance’s mission to build her vision of Mars and the conditions Resilience faces. Fly, Resilience’s drone helicopter, is based on Perseverance’s real-life drone companion, Ingenuity, also known as the Mars helicopter. Ingenuity was a test helicopter built to experiment with powered flight on Mars; as of October 2023, it has completed 61 flights and logged over 100 flight minutes, making it the first aircraft to successfully pilot itself on another planet. Resilience’s visual and auditory experiences of Mars are also based on real-life footage. Warga used the pictures and sounds that Perseverance transmitted to Earth to create her own parts of the planet. That said, Resilience’s rock formation and unidentified sound are fictional, both primarily used to build on Resilience’s desire to discover and leave a legacy behind. Warga intentionally does not have Resilience or the scientists identify the sound by the end of the book to show that discoveries take time and that mysteries are the main driver of investigation and learning. Resilience is the first rover (fictional or real) to return to Earth. NASA currently does not have the funds or technology to bring a rover back from Mars, but the hope is to one day retrieve Perseverance so that the samples it collected may be used to further research regarding sending humans to Mars.