How long would could a mars rover remain intact?

The year: Sometime a long time from now

The place: Mars

Little Bobby Colonist is going to play out in sand dunes beyond the edge of the domed city where he lives. Terraforming efforts over the last century have made the Martian atmosphere livable, but the air is still pretty thin and it gets deathly cold at night. But Little Bobby can hang out in the dunes as long as he's back by nightfall.

Today though as he's traipsing about kicking rocks, one hits something hard and metallic. Leaning down to look at it, he sees some sort of ancient wheeled device perhaps three feet long. It has some sort of scratched up reflective paneling and six wheels- well, five wheels, but a spot where a sixth would've clearly gone. Inscribed on the side in a very old dialect he can't read is the word Opportunity.

Though he doesn't know it, Little Bobby has just discovered the remains of a long-forgotten mars rover, launched from the Earth-that-was in the 21st century. And, because it's that kind of story, his entire world is about to turn upside down.

Questions:

• What year could this be? How long would a modern-day mars rover remain identifiable as such to some future-martian colonist? Might pumping large amounts of oxygen into the atmosphere and raising the temperature change this?
• Little Bobby doesn't recognize the rover and there certainly isn't a memorial or museum of any kind at the site. Is it realistic to say that humanity has established a permanent colony, started terraforming, and forgotten about it's past exploration efforts in this amount of time?

posted over 4 years ago

enpaul‭

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