NASA Shocker: Phoenix Lander Really a 14 Year-Old Girl

The Mars Phoenix Lander has a Twitter account, which seems to get updated in spastic bursts once or twice a day. Presumably, the rest of the time, the lander is too busy eating through NASA's wireless minutes jawing about last night's Gossip Girls re-run.

At least, that's what we can't help but assume, because... Fucking Twitter? For those not in the know (trust me, you're better off—you might consider skipping the rest of this paragraph), Twitter is a "micro-blogging" utility, which allows its users to text-message updates to their blog anywhere, anytime. Needless to say, the service is a boon for unrepentant narcissists and those confident that anything they have to say can be said in two sentences. Which pretty accurately describes both teenagers and publicists.

And space robots. Seriously. Look at today's post: "TEGA "cooks" soil samples until they emit gasses that I can "sniff" to learn what they are. I just hope they smell good :)". Emoticons? Emoticons? This may be humanity's first encounter with a robot that should get carded for cigarettes. (rebuttal)

Well, actually, the Dorothys at the New York Times inevitably ignored the Wizard's advice and paid attention to the man behind the curtain, or woman in this case. It turns out that Veronica McGregor, News Services Director at Pasadena, California's only redeeming feature, the Jet Propulsion Laboratory (where Phoenix is controlled), provides the spazzy voice of the lander.

From a compositional standpoint, McGregor's writing is quite impressive: Twitter limits posts to 140 characters, so to successfully convey relatively complicated technical and scientific information while still having room to pretend to wink at people and generally "ZOMG" around is an impressive feat. To put it another way, the woman manages to be extraordinarily well informed while still sounding vapid. True virtuosity.

But LW still believes that, should Phoenix actually achieve intelligence, it would establish a Twitter account anyway. After all, the only logical step after self-awareness is self-absorption.

And somewhere in the Oort cloud, V'ger would cross another 'bot off its Christmas card list.

{from the crimson-shod New York Times}

Americans Travel to Mars, Take Photos of Themselves, Buy Authentic Native Crafts and Chicklets

Sometimes it feels like picking on Boing Boing is a bit like kicking a puppy, and they're certainly not the generative cause of the hyperventilatory blogospheric upwelling of passion over the descent shots of the Mars Phoenix polar lander, but they actually tag their posts well enough to find them easily. And anyway, nobody's puppy, in our experience, has quite the same tendency to occasionally act like Gavin from Kids in the Hall. "You know in Europe, you only get one spoon..."

[Edited to add] Here is the slightly—and I mean slightly—more sober take from io9, which has more photos and prettier colors. Unearthed by our crack investigative team, which stumbled across this post while searching for online retailers of crack.

First, we'll post the photo. It is awful darn yip-able; it's an image of Phoenix about to land, taken from the Reconnaissance orbiter, and for all that it's really a smudge, just thinking that this is a man-made robot being photographed by a satellite in outer fucking space gets the old microfiche of the imagination clicking and warbling.



Got our "ahhhs" out?

Good, now shift your perspective just a smidge towards the cynical: we just sent a spaceship one hundred million-odd miles and had another spaceship we'd already sent one hundred million-odd miles photograph it. The mechanisms, albeit briefly, overwhelmed the point. It's not the fact that these photographs were taken that's vaguely migrainous, it's the level of excitement over taking photos of ourselves. At least the Phoenix lander wasn't passed out on the floor of the polar tiki bar having enjoyed one too many shots of Demosian sake. Yet.



{from poor, sweet, moist-eyed Boing Boing}