NASA scientists announced yesterday that its robotic rover Curiosity has found more than just water on the red planet. The team learned of the news on Friday night when Curiosity updated its mission status from “searching for water” to “in a relationship.
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The update came as a surprise to many, for obvious reasons. “This comes as a surprise to me, for obvious reasons,” said NASA project manager Harold Gellner. “For one, I didn’t even know that Curiosity was looking for a partner. Why didn’t it talk to me? I mean, I was the one who sent it up to Mars in the first place.
That makes us at least friends. Right?”
Others who know the machine have expressed excitement for its newfound companionship. Chief researcher Julie Mcintyre commented, “It spends so much time up there alone doing God-knows-what. I’m glad it’s finally found someone–or something. We don’t really know. We just know that it’s love and it’s true.”
Indeed, Curiosity’s new romance has raised many important questions for the scientists and engineers working on the Mars mission: Who’s the lucky entity? How’d they meet? What’s the sex like? Gellner would like to know if it has any single friends it could introduce him to.
Curiosity has not yet provided further details on the Martian fling, but researchers have reason to believe that the two met near Elysium Mons. A full report is expected to be released next month in NASA’s “Who’s Dating Whom” biweekly newsletter.
