Loser News

Mars, (Outer Space)- NASA’s Mars Rover, Perseverance, literally came up empty-handed on its initial attempt to obtain rock samples from the Red Planet’s surface.  One of the rover’s main goals is to collect samples of interesting looking rocks that may harbor signs of past life and store them for a future mission to collect and return them to Earth.

Mission Commander, Nuke Butterman, described the types of rocks that Perseverance might find “interesting”.  “He likes fruit for some reason.  So pretty much anything that looks like it might have fallen off of a tree would definitely get his attention.  He won’t pick up anything that’s jagged or crusty looking, though”, Butterman continued. “That’s just not his bag.”

The rover carries 43 aluminum containment units (pictured above), and is exploring Jezero Crater, where it will be gathering samples of rock, dust, and errant golf balls for future analysis on Earth.

“There’s always risk with breaking new ground,” Butterman said later, while eating a corndog in the NASA cafetorium “but we’re confident that, at some point, our 2.2 billion dollar baby will actually be able to put a rock in a can.”

As the rover’s primary duties are to drill and extract material from a sample, a team of specialists will be examining video from the imager located at the end of the robotic arm, which takes close-up pictures of the borehole.

“We call them the Bore-Holers!” Butterman exclaimed.  “Yeah, they’re pretty much the biggest nerds we have here, and nobody else wants to work with them.”

Once the team has a better understanding of what happened, it will be able to ascertain whether to schedule the next sample collection attempt or just scrap the project and make a video game based on the data they’ve already gathered.