maybe i was just a girl, interrupted

The soil testing equipment on Curiosity makes a buzzing noise and the pitch of the noise changes depending on what part of an experiment Curiosity is performing, this is the way Curiosity sings to itself.

So some of the finest minds currently alive decided to take incredibly expensive important scientific equipment and mess with it until they worked out how to move in just the right way to sing Happy Birthday, then someone made a cake on Curiosity’s birthday and took it into Mission control so that a room full of brilliant scientists and engineers could throw a birthday party for a non-autonomous robot 225 million kilometres away and listen to it sing the first ever song sung on Mars*, which was Happy Birthday.

This isn’t a sad story, this a happy story about the ridiculousness of humans and the way we love things. We built a little robot and called it Curiosity and flung it into the star to go and explore places we can’t get to because it’s name is in our nature and then just because we could, we taught it how to sing.

That’s not sad, that’s awesome.

Curiosity celebrates her 14th Martian birthday this week and she’s still trucking along in Gale Crater where she’s sampling Martian soil to learn about the geology and climate and teach us all about the ancient lakes that used to cover our nearest neighbor!

Thank you to everyone who keeps this post queued up so I never forget her special day. I love how much love this post gets every year.

If you would like to see what Tumblr’s favourite Rover has been up to recently you can read about her latest mission updates here and you can see her live position in Gale Crater on this map here. (You can also see the great photos she takes!)