NASA Is Now Trying to Colonize a Planet Called Twitter

In the old days, it didn’t take much more than a rocket launch to get people excited about space exploration. These days, without a manned spaceship and with minimal support from a cash-strapped Washington, they’re shooting for the moon on Twitter.

Consider Curiosity, NASA’s new Mars rover and its biggest media star-in-waiting. Her Johnny5-esque, human-like ‘face’ has already been printed in the styles of Warhol, VanGogh, et al, and NASA hopes to keep the buzz on their beloved ‘bot going all the way up to launch. Enter the “Tweetup” – a practice which has lost some of its meaning over Twitter’s brief lifetime, but generally involves real-world meeting put into motion by interactions on the 140 character-or-less microspeech platform.

The last time we launched a rocket carrying a robot to Mars, not a word of it was broadcast into the Twittersphere – because Twitter didn’t exist. But this time it’s different: In just over a month, NASA’s Jet Propulsion Lab will send Curiosity, their latest metallic Martian desert-crawler, on its journey to survey the red planet and find out whether “a selected area of Mars offered environmental conditions favorable for microbial life and for preserving evidence about life if it existed.” And if you tweet about it, you might get to watch it lift off.

Over the years, social media has become the weapon of choice for NASA’s PR department. From giving astronauts the ability to tweet and check in from the ISS to handing out twitter accounts for its active space probes, NASA has opened up new channels of enthusiasm for their craft: its main account has over 1.4 million followers, and the Cassini probe that’s currently cruising around Saturn has over 141,000 on its own. So getting people pumped about a robot that’s going to Mars should be easy, right?

Tweet or no tweet, the amount of enthusiasm NASA can drum up for their new Rover, considering relatively lukewarm PR efforts in the past, remains to be seen. Then again, the search for life on other planets should be enough to excite anyone, especially since the Mars Rover is the best thing the agency (and indeed America, and perhaps the world) has going for it in this twilight era of human space exploration.

That doesn’t mean it’s going to trend when it launches on November 25th – especially not if has to compete with hashtags like #McDmonopoly or #royalwedding for the world’s attention. I never imagined I’d say this, but for the sake of humanity, retweet.

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