My battery is getting low and it is getting dark

The message was so simple but it kindled a slow burning fire in the minds of all those who heard it. Of course it wasn’t those actual words sent from the Spirit rover but that is what the data meant when we heard it.

A lowly little robot sent to an unforgiving planet to explore it and send back data about our neighbor and we watched it outperform its mission by 20 times. It was only supposed to last 90 sols but it did so much more and lasted six Earth years instead.

And then on one lonely Martian day, its cameras caught the last dusk and it sent a last data dump to Earth about how it’s batteries were low and that the sky was getting dark and we heard from it no more.

It took us a long time. We spent way too much time fighting and squabbling and taking two steps back instead of one step forward. But on this day we have finally made it.

The lander has touched down just over a kilometer away from the last known location and we are currently suiting up and getting things ready for the search.

We are not going to worry about exploring the landscape as we already know so much about the local conditions thanks to it. And now we are ready to find it for everyone.

The amount of new technologies we had to discover, invent and build to get us here was an insurmountable barrier until the movement started and gave everyone a push then a shove and finally enough people were in positions of power that they were able to remove the naysayers and finally allow things to really progress.

And like usual it was politics that had been the main stumbling block. Too many people in power who thought that they knew more than the experts and that anything new had to be dangerous and thus had to be suppressed.

But after so many years and decades, we finally got here and now we are going to find it.

We had finally gotten outside and after the usual round of ‘One small step’ jokes and the real statements to the people watching on Earth, we started the serious job.

Unloading the vehicles went pretty fast while others unloaded and setup the shelters. We weren’t really making a base but it would be a camp where we could relax while doing the work we came here for.

Sure some of the others would be verifying data about the rocks, dirt and such around this location to compare to the data we have had for years, but that was the secondary mission objectives. Our primary mission was much more important.

We finally set out on our search with four vehicles. We didn’t call them rovers because that name had special significance now. So we were using what some are calling Mars cars which when you get down to it are just the next progression from the moon buggies but with a lot more protection.

We aren’t going too fast because we are searching for something lost for more than 40 years. It will have been covered by dust and debris and will probably look like nothing but a hump of dirt. And of course we don’t have the exact location position because there is no GPS out here on Mars.