There are some anniversaries that are worth celebrating, and the “platinum anniversary” of a Martian dick is definitely one of them. Way back in 2004, when I was still a high-school junior, the scientists at NASA in charge of the Spirit rover were doing pretty much the same thing I was; scribblin’ dicks on shit. My art was on the walls of the boy’s locker room at Gull Lake High School, but these space geniuses were crudely shuffling a phallus into the surface of a planet 186 million miles away. One small step for man, one giant dick for mankind.
NASA scientists, according to Futurism, claim this is a “standard rover turning maneuver” and have done similar drawings with the tracks of the earlier Opportunity and later Curiosity rovers as well. So Mars actually has three dicks! It’s a regular sausage fest on the fourth planet from the sun, eh?
Personally I think the NASA engineers are just covering up for their own juvenile programming. Yeah, of course the space robots turn around in a way that draws a the family jewels. That’s absolutely normal and expected. And I’m sure they also have standard programmatic maneuvers that spell out “Wash Me.” That’s totally believable.
Back in 2013, when the images were first released, NBC News had this to say as a way of explaining the frank and beans:
All those rovers have six wheels, three on each side, and they leave behind two parallel tracks when they’re traveling in a straight line. When the rover has to make a turn, the wheels rotate in place to put the robot in the desired direction for the next leg of its trek. If the turn is significant enough, you get a nice set of circles at the end of a pair of parallel tracks.
I, for one, appreciate that these NASA employees are having fun with their work. Sure these rovers need to turn in one way or another, and a dick is just as easy as any other shape to articulate, so why not?