July 6, 2025
Today in 1997, NASA’s Sojourner rover was successfully deployed on the surface of Mars. Sojourner was the first wheeled vehicle to operate on an astronomical object other than the Earth or Moon. The rover would successfully explore the surface of Mars for 92 sols, or approximately 95 Earth days.
The name Sojourner was chosen as an honor to Civil War era African-American Abolitionist and women’s rights advocate, Sojourner Truth. The naming of the rover was an essay competition put forth by the Planetary Society in 1994. Participants were to choose a “heroine to whom to dedicate the rover” and write an essay about their accomplishments and how it could be related to the Martian environment. JPL received over 3,500 essays from eight countries, but the winner would be 12-year-old Valerie Ambroise of Bridgeport, CT, and her essay about the accomplishments of Sojourner Truth.
Truth’s birth name was Isabella Bomefree, but she renamed herself to Sojourner Truth after her escape from slavery and into freedom. From there, her life’s mission was to “travel up and down the land” advocating for the right to freedom for all people, living up to her name as Sojourner as the word means “traveler passing through”. Her bravery and wandering nature made her name the perfect fit for the first planetary rover.
The image to the left is a panorama of Sojourner on Sol 2 taken by the Pathfinder lander. The image on the right is a painting of Sojourner Truth from 1850.
Images courtesy of NASA/Wikimedia commons
