Rover Gender Terminology, Contains discussion from Storm topic Options

[hendric]

I think the girls will do fine after the dust storm stops. Those solar panels are probably smoother than any natural surface on Mars, and will probably stay pretty clean overall given some modest winds. Being so high off the ground is another advantage, since any dust grains too big to be physically lofted probably won't get a chance to saltate, or bounce, on top of the panels.

Once we're immobile, I think a great experiment would be to watch the solar panels with the MI and see exactly how the dust on the panels evolve over time. Maybe they start as really small grains, and as they start to stick together, they get blown around and eventually fall off?

[David]

I think the girls will do fine after the dust storm stops.

They may be twins, but Spirit's a boy, Opportunity's a girl.

[um3k]

Spirit's a boy, Opportunity's a girl

That's funny, I always thought of it the other way around...

[Del Palmer]

I've always thought of both of them as girls, with Spirit as a gloomy goth girl, dresses in black and writes dark poetry, while OpportunityGrrl is way too cute and happy. That perception may have something to do with reading their early blogs:

http://www.livejournal.com/users/spiritrover
http://www.livejournal.com/users/opportunitygrrl

I need this dust storm to be so over.

[brellis]

This storm seems to be having some unanticipated effects on some of our forum members. Perhaps there's something in the martian air...

It's cabin fever. We need to get those girls moving!

(I think they're both girls, like Power Puff Girls, hehe)

[Stu]

...like Power Puff Girls, hehe)

I've always thought of Spirit as Aeryn Sun off FARSCAPE - gutsy space marine type, what with all that charging up and down hills and diving around ledges, and Oppy as more like STARGATE's Sam Carter, brilliant scientist but with a giddy, geeky love of exploration...

(Steve S, pleeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeease get the rovers moving again, we're starting to gnaw at the walls in here...!!!)

[Mark Adler]

Spirit's a boy, Opportunity's a girl.

There was never a clear consensus on this among the team. However the JPL director (Charles Elachi) agrees with you. His rationale was that the French words for Spirit and Opportunity are masculine and feminine, respectively.

[Reckless]

Thank you Mark

Vive la difference!

Roy

[tuvas]

I've always thought of Spirit as Aeryn Sun off FARSCAPE - gutsy space marine type, what with all that charging up and down hills and diving around ledges, and Oppy as more like STARGATE's Sam Carter, brilliant scientist but with a giddy, geeky love of exploration...

I believe Steve Squires quoted in the Roving Mars moving that Spirit was "The Problem Child", and Opportunity "Little Miss Perfect", I guess that kind of fits your descriptions...

[CosmicRocker]

I guess all this free time we find ourselves with is driving some of us balmy. I've always assumed that vessels of discovery were feminine. I thought that captains always referred to their ships as "she," regardless of the name. Has that changed?

[Exploitcorporati...]

If ever there was a convenient spot for me to drop out of Lurkspace and engage the much-admired UMSF MER crowd, this is it. The gender-specific pronoun question is both fascinating and hilarious...I've always considered spacecraft to be somewhat androgynous (excepting the unfortunate docking analogies alluded to by Arthur C. Clarke in "2010"). Strange how most of the program/vehicle nomenclature in NASA's pantheon have been masculine by the convention of naming missions after scientists, mythological figures, or "professions"; yet the machines themselves are anthropormorphized as female. As this is likely steering things further in the direction of being off-topic, I'll move to the subject at hand...

I've been following this storm with great worry and interest, and strongly empathize with the people who post here regularly. Whether boys or girls, I hope to see these astonishing rovers survive and continue their contributions to what may well be remembered as the Platinum Age of planetary exploration.

Thank you to everyone in these forums for your excellent images and personal observations.

[JRehling]

[...]

[Guest_Edward Schmitz_*]

First of all... disambiguate - it's my new favorite word!



Now, on the gender of language... It's one thing to have the masculine and the feminine in speach. I don't speak a language with a gender bias so I'll ask - does that actaully translate into thinking of the object as male or female? Seams a bit absurd. Are trees dudes to spanish speakers?

Anyway, I have never thought of the rovers as people or having gender. I try not to anthropomorphize them too much. It would make it harder for me to watch them struggle through this adventure. I perfer to think of the earthlings that are directing them. And, of course, they are male and female (mostly male for some reason).

This has been quite the glorious adventure. I'm hopeful that it isn't quite over, yet...

[stevesliva]

Language is often spoken against background noise, and languages are designed to have redundancy packed in to help disambiguate a message that had some pops and beeps blank out some of the signal.

A very interesting point, that I have not heard made anywhere else. Redundancy... I love it.

[stevesliva]

I don't speak a language with a gender bias so I'll ask - does that actaully translate into thinking of the object as male or female? Seams a bit absurd. Are trees dudes to spanish speakers?

I don't believe so... some discussion here. I do recall there being things that are jarringly wrongly gendered to our traditional stereotypes, but I can't think of any offhand.