There are birthdays worth celebrating, and a Martian’s ‘platinum birthday’ cock is definitely one of them. In 2004, while I was still in high school, the NASA scientists in charge of the Spirit rover we did pretty much the same thing as me; Scribbling dicks on shit. My art was on the walls of the boys’ locker room at Gull Lake High School, but these space geniuses were roughly mixing a phallus on the surface of a planet 186 million kilometers away. A small step for mana giant cock for humanity.
NASA scientists, according to Futurism, claim that this is a “standard rover turning maneuver” and have also made similar drawings with the tracks of the first Opportunity and later Curiosity rovers. So Mars actually has three dicks! It’s a regular sausage fest on the fourth planet from the sun, huh?
Personally, I think NASA engineers are just covering up for their own juvenile programming. Yes, of course, space robots flip in a way that draws the family jewels. This is completely normal and expected. And I’m sure they also have standard programmatic maneuvers that spell out “Wash me.” It’s entirely credible.
In 2013, when the images were first published, NBC News I had this to say to explain the franc and the beans:
All of these rovers have six wheels, three on each side, and leave behind two parallel tracks when they move in a straight line. When the rover needs to make a turn, the wheels spin in place to take the robot in the desired direction for the next stage of its journey. If the turn is big enough, you get a nice set of circles at the end of a pair of parallel tracks.
Personally, I appreciate that these NASA employees have fun in their work. Of course, these rovers have to turn somehow, and a dick is as easy to articulate as any other shape, so why not?
