PASADENA, Calif. – With growing horror, NASA officials came to the realization today that through their ongoing Mars Exploration Rover Program, they had inadvertently created a planet populated solely by robots.

Even more terrifying, explained top NASA brass, is that the population of robots operating on Mars has grown at an alarming rate. In only eight years, between 2004 and 2012, the number of robots operating on Mars has doubled.

A panel of NASA administrators and scientists said that, given the current population growth rate of robots on the Red Planet, humanity could expect to be outnumbered by robots, embittered by exile from their home world, as soon as 2055.

“At first we weren’t too worried about it, but this morning Matt [Golombek] noticed that Curiosity has been checking out a lot of iron samples recently, and that’s when it really clicked for us,” said Mars Program Chief Scientist, Richard Zureck. He went on to explain that the Curiosity rover is likely searching for iron to produce more Martian robots, and may even be planning to manufacture an armament of interplanetary weapons.

While the prospect of a fully armed and automated Mars may seem grim, some NASA officials are even more worried that they may be to blame for the development. Every 26 months, Earth and Mars line up in such a way that radio transmissions become highly degraded, and commands from Earth can become corrupted.

“While we believe that our rovers began their missions with good intentions, our greatest fear is that somehow a command we sent Curiosity two years ago to explore striations on the side of a crater was misinterpreted as orders to create an army of Martian robots tasked with destroying Earth,” Zureck said.

Rumors have begun trickling out from inside sources at NASA that they are planning on establishing counter-active robot forces on Phobos and Deimos, the two moons of Mars.