NASA’s unmanned Perseverance Rover, which landed this February in the Red Planet’s Jezero Crater following a seven-month, 300-million-mile cruise, has finally found something on that hunk of red rock worth reporting back to Mission Control.
‘Initial findings were quite disappointing,’ explained Project Manager Jennifer ‘Terminator’ Wallace to members of the press this week. ‘Our mission was to search for signs of microbial life, which basically means collecting ore samples for further study on Earth.’ BOOOO-RING.
Things got a bit more interesting, however, with the launch of the Ingenuity, a 19-inch, 4-pound automated helicopter.
‘The Ingenuity discovered a pod of Mars nymphs, known as marsads, perched on a rock outcropping approximately one mile from the rover’s location,’ ‘Terminator’ Wallace told reporters. ‘They were shimmering.’
The Gorko was frankly disappointed to learn that the Ingenuity did NOT sport rotating cannons or bring any kind of a fight to those tempting marsads.
The presence of the nymphs apparently had been concealed by the clouds of pink-orange cotton candy clouds common everywhere on the surface of the pink-orange planet. As they thinned, supposedly from the vicious wind ripping from the rotors of the Ingenuity, Mission Control could see that the nymphs were chaperoned by a very large but benign god of thunder (subsequently nicknamed Mars by the Mission Crew) and the standard lollipop elves.
‘Lollipop elves are frequently found where there are heavy, low-lying cotton candy clouds,’ a member of the Peoria Mission Crew Fan Club, Bart Weiss, told The Gorko from the window of the drive-thru. ‘Obviously all of these new discoveries are extremely exciting for us. No hot sauce, just ketchup.’