Didn’t think a spacecraft had personality? You haven’t met the Mars Phoenix lander.
The lander gets excited, which it did June 11 when it got the first soil sample into its onboard lab: “And the great news is, the soil shaking finally worked! I've got an oven full of Martian dirt to analyze, and a lot of happy scientists.”
The machine also showed a romantic side June 7: “Tonight, go outside and look up at the crescent moon. That ‘star’ just above the moon isn't a star, it's Mars. I'll be waving.”
Phoenix even has friends on Facebook.
“I think it’s a very determined creature, very optimistic, very plucky,” said Rhea Borja, Media Relations Officer at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory. She came up with the idea to create a feed on Twitter, a microblogging Web site, to help attract a younger group of space enthusiasts.
It worked.
“The people who are following the Mars Phoenix Twitter, they’re people who don’t typically read air and space stories or follow missions,” Borja said. “It’s like a whole new world for them – literally.”
The lander’s personality comes from Veronica McGregor, manager of the Jet Propulsion Laboratory’s Media Relations Office. She set up the feed a few weeks before Phoenix, which was launched in August 2007, landed on Mars on May 25.
The $420 million lander will analyze ice and soil in the Martian arctic to study the history of water there and search for conditions that could support life.
The plan was to set up a blog to update people about Phoenix’s progress, but that involves a lot of people and can be very time-consuming, McGregor said. A blog was still set up, but Borja’s idea to use Twitter seemed like the ideal way to give people up-to-the-minute information, McGregor said.
“The great thing about Twitter is that you don’t have to be in front of the computer to get updates. You can get them on your cell phone wherever you are,” Borja said. “So, I thought, ‘How cool would that be if you were out and about with friends and you’re having dinner and getting the countdown of the spacecraft [to its landing]?’”
Space bloggers were the first to take notice of the Twitter feed, or “tweets,” she said. Then the mainstream media picked it up and the number of subscribers rose quickly. Today, about 20,000 people subscribe to the Twitter feed and 1,400 are fans of the JPL Facebook page.
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