Mars Rovers
I just Googled 'roomba sojourner mod' and was sorely disappointed. Be the change, I guess!
I just Googled 'roomba sojourner mod' and was sorely disappointed. Be the change, I guess!
In this comic, Randall has made a scatter plot displaying 6 different Mars rovers on a cuteness versus capabilities chart. Only three rover pictures are shown in the main plot, as two of the four rovers are near identical to other rovers sent to Mars, and the last rover is displayed off the cuteness chart.
He finds the Curiosity and Perseverance rovers to be very capable / useful, but not very cute. Spirit and Opportunity are cuter than the first two, but less capable.
The recently launched Perseverance rover contains a drone helicopter, Ingenuity, which Randall finds pretty cute, but is unsure how exactly to grade for capability. The error bars make Ingenuity look like it's bobbing up and down, as helicopters sometimes do. It's debatable if a flying drone can be considered a Mars Rover, since a rover is usually something that drives over a surface, but the anticipated flight plan for Ingenuity is to cover some distance (by air) and then land on the ground again.
Finally, on the very right far off the cuteness chart is the Sojourner rover, launched in 1997. He considers this rover extremely cute, but ultimately not that capable. To indicate the extreme cuteness of Sojourner (previously mentioned in 1585: Similarities), he has drawn it far outside the axis of the plot to indicate it falls off the chart.
In the title text, Randall is disappointed that there aren't many people who have modified their Roomba vacuum cleaners to look or act like the Sojourner rover (or perhaps that NASA did not configure Sojourner to act as a vacuum cleaner!). Roombas are a recurring theme on xkcd. Search results at the time of posting are mainly reports mentioning the iRobot company, makers of the Roomba line, since one of its founders worked on the Sojourner rover.
The end of the title text, "be the change," is a truncated form of the expression "be the change you want to see in the world"; basically, if there's something you want to see happen, be the one who makes it happen. This implies that Randall will be modifying his Roomba to look/act like Sojourner.