Mars Phoenix at large
Move over, @therealbritney: in the world of cewebrity (web-based fame), a robot's star is rising.
Real-life celebrity Britney Spears — who's just joined Twitter as "therealbritney" — is a relative latecomer to the microblogging service. Despite her tabloid fame, she doesn't have enough followers to make it onto Twitterholic's top 50 Twitter personas, which consist mainly of web and entrepreneurial personalities and is topped by President Elect Barack Obama.
The Twitterati are a curiously speckled crowd. Beating Britney by a landslide is Mars Phoenix, a data-gathering robot exploring the face of the Red Planet. So far, it's the No. 7 most-followed persona on Twitter, with over 38,000 followers — a hair above tech blogger Robert Scoble.
Soon after penetrating the Martian polar circle in May, the robot (or rather, its human representative) began logging a "personal travelogue" on Twitter. It started as a PR experiment at NASA: Veronica McGregor, a former CNN field producer at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, found that using the first person construction took up less space ("I am…" vs. "The lander is…"), so it made sense to use it, considering that Twitter posts must be under 140 characters.
On the day the Mars Phoenix found water on Mars, his Twitter post read: "Are you ready to celebrate? Well, get ready: We have ICE!!!!! Yes, ICE, *WATER ICE* on Mars! w00t!!! Best day ever!!" Meanwhile, the same news was communicated to non-Twitter users through "sober press conferences."
The Globe and Mail playfully attributed MarsPhoenix's fame to "the Wall-E effect," referring to the 2008 Pixar film about a lonely robot whose job it is to compact trash. "Audiences will endow any piece of space junk with real feeling if you just animate it the right way."
But MarsPhoenix is more than a cute distraction; it provides descriptions of what's happening on Mars' surface, and fields reader questions, which are relayed to project scientists.
It has also sparked other uses of Twitter in the realms of NASA. Other scientists have begun using Twitter to share information about Mars discoveries from separate projects. Scientists write updates — in the third-person, using measured, logical language — about other rovers that have patrolled the planet for the past five years. But these spin-off characters have about one-sixth of the audience that MarsPhoenix has.
Unfortunately for eager "followers" — the label used to denote people that subscribe to someone's Twitter updates — the robot's stint in overnight cewebrity has ended. Yesterday, as temperatures plummeted on Mars, the Mars Phoenix "died" and messages will likely cease.
Foreseeing this tragedy, the lander ran a contest for readers to write its epitaph. The winning phrase was "Veni, vidi, fodi": I came, I saw, I dug.
