Taken from World Wide Words
Its
principal sense in English is “(a person or thing) which
stays in some place only for a short time”; though this
necessarily implies moving from place to place, it is the stay which is emphasised, not the travelling.
NASA named the rover which forms part of the Mars Pathfinder mission Sojourner following a year-long worldwide competition; the winner was Valerie
Ambroise of Bridgeport, Connecticut, who suggested it be named after
Sojourner Truth, a nineteenth-century
black feminist and campaigner for the abolition of slavery
