MARS. After passing her eighth anniversary on Mars earlier this week, the exploration rover Opportunity has started sending passive-aggressive and snide remarks to Earth about her growing disillusionment over not finding “some kind of alien monster civilization, or even a vaguely alien monster-shaped trilobite” as she was promised.
This morning NASA scientists awoke to a status report from Opportunity that read, “Holy crap! Found a monster! It’s…oh, wait, no, it’s a rock. Because that’s all that’s here.”
However, data experts at the Kennedy Space Centre have confirmed other communications from Opportunity, sent secretly to a colleague, the automated vacuum-cleaner Rubbish Rodney, to whom Opportunity has been sending nude pictures of herself for some time.
Last week she wrote: “They spent a billion bucks sending me here, and what do I find? Dust and rocks. And dust is really just tiny rock, so it doesn’t even count as two things. Unless this stuff spontaneously rearranges itself into a huge dust-beast, I’d have to say this mission has been a total failure. PS: Thanks for the pix, are you working out? Your pipe looks SO BIG!”
Opportunity has been at the Endeavour impact crater since August last year, a location that NASA scientists have described as particularly significant because the rocks there appear to be older than elsewhere on the Martian surface.
However, in another email to Rubbish Rodney, Opportunity said, “Are you kidding me? It’s still just rocks! Admittedly, I was quite excited about it at first, because I was thinking maybe the crater had been made by a crashed alien monster spaceship or something, but it turns out it was made by an even bigger rock. Honestly, I’m starting to wish one of those would land on me and end this all.”
Researchers at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory are concerned that Opportunity’s despondency is turning to hostile resentment, and could compromise the mission.
“She’s definitely become a bit passive-aggressive in her official transmissions,” explained project lead Dr Saturn V. Thrust. “On Christmas day, she sent a series of over two hundred images of the same rock, with the message ‘If you’re happy and you know it clap your…oh just fuck off’ attached to each one.”
Opportunity’s sister rover, Spirit, stopped communicating with NASA and subsequently shut down in 2010 already, after what Thrust described as a “bit of an existential crisis”.
“Our last image from Spirit showed what appeared to be a message inscribed with her Rock Abrasion Tool, reading ‘I AM THE ALIEN MONSTER’. She didn’t include any of the mineral information, but the writing surface appeared to be regular basalt so nothing new there, unfortunately,” said Thrust.
