Ever since Friday, I have been getting messages from Mars. I’m not making this up and I’m not losing touch with reality.
Through the wonders of technology, I have been receiving periodic Twitter messages from the Mars Phoenix mission. You can even talk back and ask questions (thanks to someone at the NASA mission control, who’s playing the role of the landing craft). See the conversation those of us on Twitter are having with it for yourself here. You’ll see that I’m not delusional and that my fillings aren’t picking errant radio signals.
While I will always hold nostalgic childhood memories of Marvin the Martian from the epic Bugs Bunny cartoons, I feel a much stronger connection to the Mars Phoenix lander because of the robust presence it has on the internet. NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory has created a very robust website, featuring the latest photos, videos, computer animations, blogs, and much more.
One of my favorite parts so far is the video of the mission control during the craft’s landing on Mars. They spliced the video footage of the nervous/excited engineers with computer simulation of what was happening with the craft itself. It is something that can make the hairs on the back of your neck standup.
[Note to conspiracy theorists: this was not a test run of future fake space missions, like what some people believe was pulled off during the Apollo missions.]
As you meander around the Mars Phoenix website, just think how different it is from the Walter Cronkite coverage of the Apollo moon missions, the early Space Shuttle missions, and even the last time we had a Mars mission. Thanks to the internet, you can learn all you want, when you want, and in the way you want. It’s pretty cool.
What’s your favorite part about the Mars Phoenix website?