In space, no-one can hear you twitter
17 June 2008
Are you one of the 17,000 people that tuned into the Phoenix Mars Lander twitter page last month? Do you thrill to the news that it is digging in the dirt looking for signs of life?
What a shame it is a bit of a sham! I thought it was cool that the Phoenix Mars Lander could enlighten Hayes Major, who wants to be an astronaut…or a stockbroker (this week) and Hayes Minor, who has only just relinquished his Buzz Lightyear fancy dress, about the wonders of space travel.
Sadly, the tweets are not from Mars, but from a very well-informed media director of NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Veronica McGregor. She used to be a space reporter for the US news channel, CNN, and now updates the Phoenix microblog each evening after work. It is still a good educational tool though, keeping the project alive in people’s minds and feeding enquiring minds. It is also great for pub quizzes: How long does it take for a signal form Mars to reach Earth? I know, that one! 15minutes, travelling at 186,000 mile/sec. No need to phone a friend.
When I was young, I remember a teacher getting cross with the class because we were not as enthused as she thought we should have been. “The trouble is, you have all grown up knowing that man can reach the moon,” she said, putting the date of our birth down to the fact that nothing amazes or overawes us. This is the problem that NASA had with the Mars mission, how to generate interest in the project, when space travel is not grabbing the headlines like it used to. The story goes that in a staff meeting, someone suggested a twitter page instead of a landing blog, which apparently in itself is passé.
It worked. By the time Phoenix landed, the site had 3,000 subscribers, all tuning in to hear, in characters of 140 or less, how it is dealing with the night temperatures of -122°F and how the ‘dig and dump’, the robotic arm and scoop, are getting along in the mission’s search for life on Mars.
The twitter is interactive, with subscribers sending questions as well as receiving the updates posted by McGregor. The beauty of twitter is that you get a text every time an update is posted. It has been described as a personalised RSS feed in this case and is far more popular that NASA’s blogs for other missions and has eclipsed that other Web 2.0 phenomenon, Facebook, where Jet Propulsion Laboratory has a page.
The problem facing the Phoenix is that it will have to shut down for the Martian winter so the twittering will cease, but it has proved a captivating foray into the interactive world of the web.
Live long and prosper, tweeters.
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