
Every Year on August 5th, the Curiosity Rover Sings a Lonely Birthday Song - s_q_b
https://curiosity.com/memes/every-year-the-curiosity-rover-sings-a-lonely-birthday-song-curiosity/?shrink=1&utm_source=facebook&utm_medium=social&utm_content=meme&utm_campaign=20160805fbk00CRSTcuriositybday#meme-nasa-happy-birthday-curiosity-nasa-goddard
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asimuvPR
At first I felt sad. Thinking of how Curiosity feels all alone in Mars. Slowly
moving towards its objective day after day. However, Curiosity is not alone.
Many people are rooting for her. Singing happy birthday and celebrating
achievements. It has shown that machines carry the hearts of their creators.
That makes me feel happy. Continue onwards Curiosity. Here is to another
wonderful year of adventure and discovery!

~~~
Natanael_L
Here's two versions of the XKCD comic for Spirit with a happy ending appended;

[https://imgur.com/VbKV9DF](https://imgur.com/VbKV9DF)
[https://i.imgur.com/VZvj5S7.jpg](https://i.imgur.com/VZvj5S7.jpg)

~~~
asimuvPR
Thank you for posting. Those are lovely and worth of being displayed on the
walls of my lab. :)

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noir_lord
It amazes me that Disney/Pixar haven't considered doing an animated film about
the NASA rover program, they have so much 'personality'.

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rurounijones
Wall-E basically got that done

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ubersync
They say it was "born" on Mars on August 5th. Shouldn't we celebrate its
birthday every 687 days? Since Mars year = 687 earth days.

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fovc
I'm waiting for them to be sued for copyright infringement

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JoeAltmaier
Not played in the US? So no issue

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logicallee
copyright applies everywhere on Earth.

So, still not an issue.

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fshean
Actually no it doesn't. Copyright is a legal concept enforced by laws of
various countries and different countries have different laws.

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Fiahil
I can almost feel the "bored scientist" moment behind this idea :)

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brudgers
NASA wins best demo ever.

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Intermernet
I didn't know this. And my birthday is august 5th. From now on I'll tip a
glass for my roving robotic friend.

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ezequiel-garzon
"Curiosity, a huge accomplishment in interstellar exploration"

I feel a deep sense of wonder with all these achievements, but isn't this
description a wild stretch? Necessary first steps, for sure, but...

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inopinatus
I agree. This hyperbolic phrase would likely not have survived a persnickety
editor, who might've replaced "interstellar" with "interplanetary".

Source: I am a persnickety editor.

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nitrogen
More media organizations desperately need good editors. It gets very
distracting to find obvious errors even in science journalism.

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okket
Wouldn't the very low atmospheric pressure prevent any sound from being
transported? So it vibrates the birthday tune, but only via seismic waves, not
sound. Nice touch anyway :)

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mhurron
[http://cosmiclog.nbcnews.com/_news/2012/04/04/11023933-how-w...](http://cosmiclog.nbcnews.com/_news/2012/04/04/11023933-how-
would-you-sound-on-mars?lite)

[http://www.sciencemag.org/news/2006/06/mars-no-one-can-
hear-...](http://www.sciencemag.org/news/2006/06/mars-no-one-can-hear-you-
scream)

It'll make a sound, but it won't go far.

Also, the thought of Curiosity singing alone on Mars makes me sad now.

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s_q_b
A good rover would keep going. A good rover like they wanted.

Did I do a good job? Do I get to come home?... Guys?......

[https://xkcd.com/695/](https://xkcd.com/695/)

~~~
Natanael_L
Happy versions here;
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12239358](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12239358)

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widforss
Now, wouldn't it be more appropriate to align the job with the marsian year?
But I assume that wouldn't work as well as PR.

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erikb
I'm quite sure it doesn't sound like that on Mars, though. Think about how
different dolphins sound because their music is sent through water instead of
normal earth air.

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shash7
That's really poignant.

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existencebox
Allow me to wax philosophical for a moment.

My wife is very emotion driven. She legitimately cried about the philae
shutdown, and had to rectify how she "looked at" the shutdown to not feel sad
about it, but I feel like my sysadmin background helps in this.

These tools, as much as we attach emotion to them, are tools, extensions of
the will of those who made them. A sysadmin will NEVER win in the long run.
Our best success is averting failure yet another day; yet another day.
Similarly an engineer will never build a tool that lasts forever. But each
year is another accomplishment, another triumph of their competence against
the increasingly likely probability that "everything is on fire."

So less than poignancy, I see it as a trumpet call, a triumph procession. Each
year is another year of spitting in the face of every absurd hardware bug,
quantum event, cosmic ray, and meteor that'd love nothing more than to ruin
some scientist's day. These missions to which we assign so much personality do
not "die", so much as "manage to persist against all odds", and it keeps me in
constant awe of the people who set out and succeed, even a little, at these
endevours.

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mac01021
I wonder what the cost of this was, given the famous degree of rigor displayed
by NASA in the development and testing of their control software.

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erikb
(not a downvoter) Since it is mostly about transfering bits and wasting some
time on the equipment it is not a big cost at all. Saving 0.0001% in the next
travel to mars and they probably have covered the next 10 billion birhtdays.

