Stargazing

Answer:

SPIRIT

You can begin by answering each of the Jeopardy! style questions. Each clue references a scientific invention, achievement, or event in human history. The answers are ordered by time with earlier inventions/events listed first. To buzz in an answer, you'll have to input it into our answer checker, which will then give you a star that can be found on the given star map.

No. Year Clue Answer Star
1 1608 Galileo used this to discover that Jupiter has its own moons. TELESCOPE Vega
2 1642 Blaise Pascal invented this implement for performing arithmetic automatically. MECHANICAL CALCULATOR Sarin
3 1698 The first commercial version of this was a water pump developed by Thomas Savery. STEAM ENGINE Kornephoros
4 1783 The first untethered manned flight of this buoyant object was performed by Jean-François Pilâtre de Rozier and François Laurent d'Arlandes. HOT AIR BALLOON Arcturus
5 1792 This was invented by the creator of Morse code and revolutionized information sending across long distances. TELEGRAPH Tania Australis
6 1816 Joseph Nicéphore Niépce is widely accepted as the inventor of this tool which allows one to preserve memories. CAMERA Pollux
7 1822 This was the name of the first programmable mechanical computer, courtesy of Charles Babbage. DIFFERENCE ENGINE Wasat
8 1834 First created by Moritz Jacobi, Jacobi's second version of this was powerful enough to drive a boat with 14 people across a wide river. ELECTRIC MOTOR Castor
9 1859 Invented by French physicist Gaston Planté, this was the earliest type of rechargeable battery, with a large power-to-weight ratio that makes it attractive for use in motor vehicles. LEAD ACID BATTERY θ-Aur
10 1876 Using the telegraph line between Brantford and Paris, Ontario (a distance of eight miles), the inventor of this device made the "world's first long-distance call." TELEPHONE Capella
11 1879 Thomas Edison is widely credited for inventing this object, as well as making other breakthroughs in lighting technology, including [developing the first commercial power utility called Pearl Street Station in lower Manhattan and] inventing the first electric meter. LIGHT BULB ε-Per
12 1882 This coal-fired power station, the first of its kind, generated electricity for street lamps in London. EDISON ELECTRIC LIGHT STATION Mirfak
13 1886 First invented by Karl Benz, Henry Ford innovated mass-production techniques which became standard for this product. AUTOMOBILE γ-Tri
14 1887 American inventor Charles F. Brush built the first automatically operated one of this. WIND TURBINE Mirach
15 1903 Wilbur and Orville Wright made four brief flights at Kitty Hawk with this invention. AIRPLANE φ-Psc
16 1928 John Logie Baird demonstrated the first color transmission of this machine using mechanical rotating disks to scan moving images into electronic impulses. TELEVISION π-And
17 1933 Originally patented by Edwin Armstrong, this technology is now used for most music broadcasts since it is capable of higher fidelity compared to other broadcasting technologies. FM RADIO Deneb
18 1947 The first of its kind consisted of a block of germanium with two very closely spaced gold contacts held against it by a spring to create a point-contact diode. TRANSISTOR ε²-Lyr
19 1954 Bell Labs developed this technology which was capable of converting the sun's energy into power to run everyday electrical equipment. PHOTOVOLTAIC CELL θ-Dra
20 1957 This satellite, the first to be launched into an elliptical low Earth orbit, orbited for three weeks before its batteries died. SPUTNIK 1 Grumium
21 1969 While Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin became the first men to step on the moon, he flew the Command Module Columbia alone in lunar orbit. MICHAEL COLLINS Altais
22 1971 This space station was originally planned to launch on the 10th anniversary of Yuri Gagarin's flight on Vostok 1, but technical problems delayed it by one week. SALYUT 1 ψ-Dra
23 1983 Originally intended for military use, President Ronald Reagan opened this system to the public after a Korean passenger jet was shot down when it strayed from its intended route into Soviet prohibited airspace. GPS Edasich
24 1990 This information system used Uniform Resource Locators to identify documents and other web resources accessible over the Internet. WORLD WIDE WEB Mizar
25 1992 This IBM device, invented 15 years before the iPhone was released, was equipped with a touch screen and the ability to send and receive emails and faxes. SIMON PERSONAL COMPUTER Thuban
26 2010 This Japanese solar sail based spacecraft completed its planned mission to Venus in 29 weeks. IKAROS κ-Dra
27 2016 The Google DeepMind Challenge Match featured this Go-playing computer program which beat 18-time world champion Lee Sedol in four out of five games. ALPHAGO Dubhe
28 2019 This computer, touted as the world's first-ever circuit-based quantum computer, can be accessed by clients through the cloud. IBM Q SYSTEM ONE Alioth

Once you collect all the stars, you'll need to identify them on the map and draw out a new constellation. (Wikipedia will generally have helpful constellation maps; other websites like this one might also be helpful.) Starting with Vega (which is the star returned by the first clue), draw out a path passing through each clue's star in chronological order. You'll get an image that looks like the one below.


Resemble something familiar? If you try checking GHOST against the answer checker, we'll prompt you:

Close... is there another name for a ghost?

After a few tries, hopefully you'll arrive at SPIRIT, which is the answer to this puzzle.

That's correct! Wall-E has spirit and so do you puzzle hunters! Spirit was a Mars rover active from 2004 to 2010. It was one of two rovers of NASA's Mars Exploration Rover Mission. In 2004, Spirit landing on Mars was named the Breakthrough of the Year by the journal Science.

Authors' Notes

This was a relatively lengthy puzzle, but hopefully you learned a lot of fun scientific and space-related facts. Whereas WALL•E considers how our relationship with space, technology, and our planet might evolve in the future, this puzzle traveled backwards and highlighted a subset of key technologies and events that have led us to where we are today.

We had some fun deciding what inventions we wanted to include and how to write our Jeopardy! style clues. There are a lot of important scientific achievements, but for this puzzle, we leaned towards advancements in space, travel, energy, communication, and computing.

The second half of the puzzle relied on drawing out a new constellation. We wanted to do a kind of "connect-the-dots" puzzle without making it too easy. Stars happen to lend themselves very well to this, but star identification is probably a little tedious for most. We hope this wasn't too hard, and that at least our image was fun to draw!

We thought it would be flavorful to have the final answer be the name of a Martian rover, because rovers play a key role in space exploration and are little robots that resemble WALL•E! It's somewhat poetic to imagine WALL•E looking up at the night sky, wondering who or what else is up there, while a Martian rover like Spirit looks back and wonders the same. Spirit ended up being a good choice both because it's flavorful (a rover whose name is a synonym for "soul") and because it is a relatively simple image to draw. (Drawing out an abstract concept like "Curiosity" or "Opportunity", or a complex symbol like an actual rover would have been much, much more tedious!)