Well, not quite intergalactic, but from Mars….and that’s pretty damn cool. It’s been a while any of the space missions have captured my imagination, only this morning I was reading about the “Jules Vern” spacecraft that’s essentially a posh rubbish bin that the astronauts on the International Space Station pile their rubbish into before aiming it at the atmosphere where it’s obliterated by the heat. Alright, I think I’ve mad it sound cooler that it is….cos it’s just a big bin, sorry Esa. On the other hand, The Mars Phoenix Lander is a far more interesting tale and one that we can follow practically minute by minute because the thing (or some engineer) is tweeting its journey so that us mere Earthlings can follow. One of the latest tweets reads “News of my demise is premature but I appreciate the warm thoughts :-) I plan to last many more weeks before ice & darkness win”, The Mars Phoenix Lander also informed us “Solar panels generate about 2000 watt-hours of energy per sol (down from 3500 in June). So plan is to dig many samples now & then analyze”.
MyTake – What an awesome use of twitter and totally cost-effective – hardly used any taxpayer money. Space missions just don’t get the coverage they used to and this is a very innovative way of allowing people to follow it using a medium that could have been made for it – hey NASA, you didn’t invent Twitter did you? I wonder if CERN are on twitter….. you could just imagine the tweets: ”smashed another proton…..I rock”.
2 comments:
I love the Lander's tweets. I found out about it right when they found evidence of water ice, and started following him/her/it. And I like that they've given the Lander a personality - and are having some fun with it.
Not surprising, really. NASA must have the highest proportion of techno-geeks on the planet. Or on Mars. Or soemthing.
The entire universe I think. I loved it when everyone thought he was about to bite the dust, but then he fought back!
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