In their defense, they think it’s probably a piece off of the rover itself, and they want to make sure it doesn’t contaminate their soil samples, or damage their instruments.
But, the thought of a multi-million dollar, high-tech space probe going “Oooh! Shiny!” is still pretty funny.
There was the Soviet Venera 14 probe to Venus. After landing, the lens caps popped off the cameras. And there was a spring-loaded arm that was supposed to swing down and measure the compressibility of the soil. When the arm was let loose, it came down right on the lens cap.
Maybe they were just trying to spread the load…yeah, that’s the ticket.
(Actually, what I really wanted to do is somehow make a joke referencing Robot Arms responding to me, a Soviet Lander and this Futurama Clip, but I couldn’t find a way to make it all come together in a nice clever way without having the joke getting lost and it just being an insult… Come to think of it, IIRC, Futurama is where RA got his user name from. )