Expressing their concern for the rover’s safety and well-being, NASA’s lonely scientists admitted Tuesday that they wished InSight would Skype home every now and then. The sophisticated machine, launched from Earth almost two years ago, has barely kept in touch with its home planet.
“It seems like only yesterday when InSight was just an innocent little pile of unassembled copper wiring and laser retroreflectors,” said NASA’s cohort of empty-nester astrophysicists and aerospace engineers, as they nostalgically re-watched a video of InSight’s first steps and first successful biochemical analysis of geologic samples. “Look, we get that the beginning of an interplanetary expedition is a very liberating experience in a young rover’s life. And sure, InSight needs this formative time and space away from us to discover the vast expanses of the Martian landscape. But please, at least call home once in a while to tell us how you’re doing. We’ll always be your engineers who want to know if you’re okay and if your mechanical systems are properly functioning.”
At press time, InSight was silencing a call that it received from NASA’s concerned scientists because it was in the middle of doing donuts in a large Martian crater with the Curiosity rover.
Editor’s Note: This article is purely satirical and fictitious. All attributions in this article are not genuine and this story should be read in the context of pure entertainment only.
Contact Prateek Joshi at pjoshi2 ‘at’ stanford.edu.