The citizens of Earth will soon say goodbye to a distant traveler. The Cassini spacecraft, built by NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, is set to begin its final mission in the next few weeks. Cassini will drift up and down between Saturn and its rings 22 times from now until September, collecting data about the nature of the rings’ origin and the composition of the planet’s atmosphere. Then, in September, Cassini will make its final descent, flying down towards Saturn’s elusive surface before burning up in the gaseous atmosphere, beaconing messages towards home until its final moment.
This sad farewell will come a little over 20 years after Cassini first left Earth. In 1997, NASA’s Cassini spacecraft launched and sailed through space, past Mars and through the asteroid belt towards the outer solar system, reaching Saturn’s orbit a little over seven years later. Once the spacecraft arrived, Cassini collected data on a few of Saturn’s many moons, including Titan and Enceladus, searching for water and the possibility of life outside of Earth. Cassini has also done close fly-bys of several of Saturn’s moons, including Pan and Atlas, providing the first ever up-close images of these orbiting bodies. Cassini has provided NASA with ground-breaking images and data of Saturn and her moons, and the rover’s contributions will be missed.
It is sad to witness the end of an era– after completing a seven-year journey from Earth to Saturn, Cassini has been collecting data on the gaseous giant and its moons since 2004– and the destruction of all the hard work that hundreds of people invested into Cassini, and yet. It’s just a robot. Nothing more than a few bundles of wire, some batteries, a radio or two, a handful of circuits and some solar panels. All put together, these things make Cassini, the faithful spacecraft that has been pinging information back to NASA for almost 13 years.
So why is the thought of Cassini’s impending demise so upsetting? It’s not like I knew the rover personally.
Believe it or not, Cassini is not the first spacecraft that I have fallen for. When the rovers Spirit and Opportunity first landed on the surface of Mars, I was eight years old. My dad has always been a fan of all space-related things– Star Trek, Firefly, and the planet Mars to name a few. When he was nine, he watched Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin walk on the moon with his family from the floor of a motel room in North Carolina. When Spirit and Opportunity landed, my dad bought a documentary about how the rovers were made, and we would watch it together in the living room while eating popcorn. We watched NASA engineers painstakingly test the rovers’ wheels on obstacle courses constructed of fake rocks that were meant to mimic the rough Martian surface. We watched different engineers fold and unfold the rovers’ solar panels, trying to figure out the most efficient way to tuck them away in case of a dust storm, which could severely damage the fragile cells. One of my favorite parts to watch was the animated simulations of the rovers landing (if you have never seen a video of it, you can watch it here). When the rover got low enough in Mars’ atmosphere, each side of the rover’s protective case blew up with giant balloons. A parachute lowered the rover until it was at the correct altitude, then the cord was cut and the rover would bounce, bounce, bounce across the Martian terrain until it finally rolled to its resting place. Once we were well-versed in how the rovers worked, my Dad and I would track Opportunity and Sprit’s progress and most recent discoveries on Mars. It was common for me to come home from to school to find a print-out of the latest rover news placed on my placemat at my spot at the dining room table.
My fascination with space robots is not just limited to the Mars rovers. A few years after Spirit and Opportunity landed on Mars, WALL-E appeared in theaters. Short for “Waste Allocation Load Lifter Earth-Class,” WALL-E is a glorified trash can, and yet he managed to capture my heart. I wasn’t the only one apparently, as the WALL-E movie went on to win an Academy Award for Best Animated Feature Film. Other well-known robots are R2-D2 and BB-8 of the Star Wars franchise. R2-D2, also a glorified trash can, and BB-8, a soccer ball with a head, are even less human-esque than WALL-E, as neither of them can speak (they can “beep” to communicate, but then again, so can my coffee-maker). And yet, fans of the franchise are incredibility fond of them. If either are injured in one of the films, fans visibly react with anger or distress.
This again leads me to the thought– why would we react this way? They’re just space robots, and in the case of WALL-E, R2-D2, and BB-8, they’re fictional space robots. So why do we feel dismay when they are injured and distress when they die?
It turns out the answer is rather simple: to us, the robots seem human. Even though the Spirit rover and R2-D2 aren’t humanoid, we still view them as having human qualities. We can interact with them, we can talk to them (even if they can’t talk back), we can name them and assign them genders (Opportunity is a “she”, R2-D2 is a “he”). When R2-D2 is separated from Luke, we fear for him. When WALL-E sacrifices himself for the other robots and humans aboard the space-cruise ship, we mourn for him. When Spirit’s wheel broke and became stuck, we felt sadness at the loss of a distant companion.
The technical term for this is anthropomorphization, which is a long word for a simple concept. Essentially, anthropomorphization is when we give human qualities to nonhuman objects. In this case, our nonhuman objects are the space robots of reality and fiction. We view these robots as being autonomous, or as having control over their actions, which we associate with animal behavior. We cannot see the underlying hardware and programming that causes a robot to make specific actions, so we only see the cause (whatever input the robot receives from the environment) and the effect (the robot’s output). Therefore, what is actually the result of complicated programming appears to us to be autonomous decision-making. (Slight side note: the HBO series Westworld does a great job exploring the gray area between robots and autonomous beings, and is worth watching.)
The act of anthropomorphizing a robot is powerful. A study by Laurel D. Riek, Tal-Chen Rabinowitch, Bhismadev Chakrabarti, and Peter Robinson found that when people watched videos of a child and a robot experiencing verbal and physical aggression, they felt empathy and compassion for both the child and the robot. Participants recognized that protecting the child from aggression was more important than protecting the robot, but they couldn’t help but feel sorry for the robot– even for robots like a Roomba, which has no human qualities.
And so, as I prepare to say goodbye for good to Cassini, I feel a little better about mourning the loss of a spacecraft I have never seen in person. I mourn the loss of Cassini’s life, but I also celebrate the thousands of hours of hard work, the frustration, and the pride, that went into creating Cassini. Cassini made an impact, on those who knew it and on those who didn’t, and I will be happy knowing that, if only for a few moments, a ball of fire will light up Saturn’s sky some day or night in late September.
Header Photo: A rendition of Cassini orbiting Saturn (Jet Propulsion Lab, NASA)
The Life of a Mind 