No one is sure if it was the work of a bored NASA employee, or just a coincidental moving pattern on the part of the robot itself, but the Mars Opportunity rover drew what appears to be a penis on the surface of Mars with its tracks. Penis graffitti has a pretty long history here on Earth (the ancient Romans were pretty fond of it), so I suppose we shouldn’t be surprised that robots are doing it now too. The image was discovered on NASA’s official site by a Reddit user yesterday, and since then the photo has gone viral.

Not familiar with the Opportunity rover? Opportunity landed on the red planet, along with its twin rover Spirit, in 2004. Its mission was similar to the more recent, technologically advanced Curiosity — try and find traces of water on the Martian surface; collect and categorize Martian rocks and minerals; and search for any extramartian materials (so, meteorite fragments and the like). The original mission was only supposed to last 90 sol (that is what they call Martian days, which are slightly longer than Earth’s. It’s the equivalent of about 92.5 Earth days), but Opportunity has been on Mars for 3282 days and counting. Unlike its twin rover, which has been immobile since 2009, it’s still sending information back to Earth, which is where the image comes from.

Maybe jealousy is what inspired Opportunity to draws its grafitti. Curiosity gets a lot of attention, and it’s all a plot to get itself in the news (it’s working!). More likely though is it’s a complete coincidence. Rovers have to make a series of right turns to naviagate the surface of Mars, which often results in circles, and if you make enough circles and then drive in a straight line for a bit, you get well, this.

[via Gizmodo]

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Megan Patterson is the Science and Technology Editor at Paper Droids and currently a Toronto Standard intern. She also tweets more than is healthy or wise. 

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