“I only hummed ‘Happy Birthday’ to myself once, back in 2013.”
“The reports of my singing are greatly exaggerated,” the rover’s Twitter account reported, presumably referring to news coverage about its fifth birthday. (NASA counts the anniversaries in Earth years, which are shorter than Martian years.) But the rover didn’t sing. The thought of a space robot serenading itself all by its lonesome certainly tugs at the heartstrings.Ĭuriosity marked its fifth year on Mars last week. “WHEN HUMANS LAND ON MARS, WE BETTER DAMN GIVE THAT ROVER A HUG!!!” one user wrote. The news of Curiosity’s mini-celebration of perhaps the loneliest birthday in the galaxy prompted a deluge of empathy in comment sections around the Internet. From inside a Martian crater, millions of miles away from home, Curiosity sang “Happy Birthday” to itself. To celebrate the mission’s first successful year on Mars, engineers programmed the unit to vibrate to a musical tune. In August 2013, NASA decided to use the sample-analysis unit’s vibrations for something a little different. There, the unit heats up the soil, causing the grains to release fumes that scientists can study for hints of organic compounds. The unit vibrates at different frequencies, shaking the powdery sample so it settles down into small cups. Its robotic arm collects a pinch of soil and drops it into the sample-analysis unit in the robot’s belly. When the Curiosity rover studies soil on Mars, it does it with a little shimmy.