$Billion Graffiti on Mars

That's a wheel of the Curiosity Rover. NASA's rover. The car sized rover was designed and build by the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California.

There's an undocumented, unsourced story about the pattern on the wheels. Originally, the design left the letters "JPL" in the sand. Apparently, someone at NASA objected. They said it should read "NASA". JPL execs quietly avoided the confrontation by removing all lettering in the treads. No one noticed anything unusual about the new design.

Instead, NASA accepted delivery, bolted the rover into a $1B rocket and flew it to Mars.

In Morse Code

J is - — — —

P is - — — -

L is - — - -

It's deliberately backwards, but you can see the reversed L and the P on the wheel.

Lesson: Give hard working folks credit, or they might find ways to take it anyway.