It apparently pays to carry the biggest, baddest camera to ever grace the surface of Mars. Scientists studying pictures from one of the most recent NASA Martian explorers, Mars Reconnaissance Observer (MRO), have spotted one of its earlier, surface-bound cousins, the 1997 Martian probe that re-started it all: Pathfinder. The big, bad camera in MRO's big, bad camera bay is none other than the High Resolution Imaging Science Experiment, or HiRISE.

It has been noted that Pathfinder is actually big enough to be spotted by one of MRO's predecessors, the Mars Global Surveyor (MGS), says New Scientist. Unlike MGS, though, MRO's HiRISE is powerful enough to resolve objects as small as under 30cm across - that's a standard ruler's length, and two to five times smaller than the details MGS could resolve. This means that HiRISE may have also found the other half of NASA's adorable little Martian family, Sojourner. Maybe. Or maybe not.

The size of a rather large toaster oven (63cm lengthwise), Sojourner was last spotted around 13 meters away from Pathfinder, and that was three months after it first set foot on Martian sands. Trying to interpret MRO photos, scientists believe they found Sojourner 6 meters away from Pathfinder. Or maybe they spotted some rocks - they can't really be sure.

They'd like to study future pictures of the Pathfinder landing site from HiRISE, this time taken with higher resolutions in infrared and blue-green, in the hopes that one of these color wavelengths would be reflected by Sojourner's solar panels. Then they'd get positive ID on the toaster.