I have totally been wowed by NASA’s use of social media to explain, explore, enthuse and otherwise entertain us with their mission to Mars via the Phoenix robot lander.
I followed the little guy in Twitter (over 38K followers!) which was great fun as we got information about the mission and what was being discovered.
He also was a guest blogger on Gizmodo, which some folks might have dismissed as a Wall-E kinda thing but I thought it was very clever and probably did a lot for science education. I mean, why not use the communication tools of today to share information and fascination with everybody in the way that they want to get it.
Really, really good stuff.
But, today was the Phoenix’ last blog entry and a farewell on Twitter made it pretty obvious:
As the robot shuts down and ends its work in the Mars winter. I will miss those little updates but I will also really consider how NASA made such good use of the technology available to spread their information wealth.
Phoenix Mars Lander: This is My Farewell Transmission From Mars
ummm…pretty obvious?? I guess I’m oblivious!
That’s binary for “Triumph”….that part wasn’t obvious to me but just the final post made it clear that Phoenix was done.
I’m one of the people following him too! It’s really interesting.