It's Been 20 Years Since NASA Drew A Penis On Mars

Even rocket scientists are allowed to have a juvenile side

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Spirit Rover tire tracks on the surface of Mars
Image: NASA

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?

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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.

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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.

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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?