Rogue Rover Recovered

     "It was just lying there belly up at the bottom of the ravine. At first, I didn't know what it was, it was all muddy and everything. I climbed down and wiped some mud off it and I saw in big letters: 'ROSCOE'. That's when I remembered hearing about this thing in June. I called the sheriff's department and they fetched them Podebrad boys up here."

     Chief Research Scientist for the Mars Rover Project, Dr. Bernad Zinn expressed his relief and joy at recovering the rover, "This is like finding the Prodigal Son. To have six years of work just vanish is a terrible ordeal."

     Asked for a reason why the rover malfunctioned, Trevor Spain, a graduate researcher on Zinn's staff who believed at the time that Roscoe had been taken over by the severed rabbit head, sheepishly explained what he found inside the machine.

     "A baby rabbit head gotten wedged up inside the machine during the mowing test and caused a short. Instead of approaching objects and running its object identification process, it just simply avoided them. That's why it was so fast. It didn't have to identify anything, it just avoided stuff."

     Spain explained that he had previously used several of the processors for building an artificial hand system called the Fine Motor Task Hand (FMT) for people who hand lost their own hand. The FMT Hand enabled the user to perform fine motor tasks such as drawing, sewing, typing, and even playing the piano albeit with a 60% reduction in speed. The processors' low power requirements provided the use of light weight circuitry which played an important role for use in both the rover and the artificial hand.

     "The chips run on very low current loads making them ideal for processing neuro-electric impulses for the FMT Hand. So, when the rover started acting strange, knowing what I did about the chips in it, I guess I leapt too eagerly to the wrong conclusion. Well, hell, you know it was starting and stopping, running straight for something then darting out of the way---just like a rabbit."

     Asked if the rover was reparable, Spain, smiled boradly, "You betcha. It was only a little goopy. Works perfectly again."

     Roscoe is slated for a demonstration before a NASA mission review committee in early November.