NASA Public Affairs Office admitted today that NASA Adminstrator Dan Goldin's obsessive quest to eradicate the old NASA "worm " logo had made use of better, cheaper, faster technology.

Goldin was reportedly dismayed to see no evidence of NASA's 'meatball logo' in imagery beamed back from Mars by the Sojourner Rover. Goldin was especially angered by the prominence of JPL's logo whose design echoes that of the now forbidden NASA worm logo. Goldin has often referred to JPL's logo as a "pale, stale knock-off of a has-been work ethic".

Goldin was only made aware of the potential embarassment that might result from minimal meatball visibility on Mars after Pathfinder was launched last year. Once again, according to an exclusive interview with Dan Goldin "NASA's brilliant engineers were able to rise to the challenge issued by me. A complex series of gravitational assist maneuvers, solar sail technology, and aerobraking allowed mission managers to move the RIFsat spacecraft from Earth orbit to Mars such that it arrived only a few days after Pathfinder landed."

Goldin would not respond to reporter's questions relating to his preoccupation with eradicating the old NASA Worm logo or inquiries into how much money NASA had spend to date to remove the old logo. Goldin also had no comment regarding the similarity between the NASA worm and the bicentenial logo on the Viking landers.

Once in orbit, RIFSat positioned itself such that it orbits Mars close to the horizon at the landing site, thus making sure that it appears in a large number of lander imagery. Once the Sojourner rover's mission is over and no additional PR value is to be gotten from new imagery, RIFSat will reorient itself so as to function as an orbiting relay satellite for future Mars missions.

According to NASA PAO, RIFSat was originally designed and launched during the STS-77 mission when a RIF (Reduction in Force) was being contemplated at NASA Headquarters, RIFSat was designed to track NASA HQ employees as they moved on to new jobs so as to be certain that they were all taken care of. According to Dan Goldin, "these same advanced sensors will now be used to accurately locate objects on the Martian surface and will aid in coordinating sample return missions now planned for early in the next century". Goldin went on to hail RIFSat as "yet another shining example of NASA's committment to developing dual use technology and employing it across the solar system".