In the science-fiction story The Martian, astronaut Mark Watney is stranded on Mars. He restores an old NASA spacecraft called Pathfinder to contact Earth.
Pathfinder really landed on Mars in 1997. NASA says its computer’s instructions could be changed, and an astronaut could in principle control it.
The rescue is fiction. But the story uses a real feature of the spacecraft: a computer that could be reprogrammed.