When the Curiosity Rover landed on Mars earlier today, it represented humanity at its best. The mission, designed to see if Mars ever supported microbial life, pushes to the technological boundaries of what is possible. So naturally when Curiosity touched down on the planet’s surface, anyone in the know celebrated. And then Twitter got involved.
Sure most of the tweets were appropriately celebratory, but as is the case with most celebrations there were a few jokers in the pack. Some were a bit lame, but there were a good few pearlers out there. Memeburn picked out some some of the best for you. Enjoy:
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One user remembered that the character of Howard Wallowitz from TV show The Big Bang Theory does work for NASA on Mars Rovers:
I don’t get how NASA got their Mars Rover data.. I thought Wolowitz crashed it?
— Guinness (@GuinnessTweets) August 6, 2012
There were, of course, references to the Olympic Games, with a few digs at US broadcaster NBC thrown in for good measure:
OH “The nerds just took gold in the 560 billion metres”
#curiosity— Ben Lunt (@blunt_) August 6, 2012
if you missed the Mars rover landing, you can watch it tomorrow on NBC or in 2 years on HBO.
— Morgan Murphy (@morgan_murphy) August 6, 2012
The Olympics is cool and all but today NASA is lowering a car sized rover onto Mars using nylon strings attached to a rocket powered shelf.
— Catherine(@CatherineQ) August 5, 2012
The Mars rover has almost completed its amazing journey. Meanwhile, in London, someone ran really fast and then jumped into some sand.
— Mark Leggett (@markleggett) August 6, 2012
Appropriately for a social media platform, there were a couple of quips based on Instagram and Foursquare:
Congrats
@marscuriosity you are the mayor of Mars. One more check-in and yo will unlock the “Mars Rover” badge— Ina Fried (@inafried) August 6, 2012
Instagram was a strange choice of medium for the Mars rover to communicate in.
— Josh Helfferich (@JoshHelfferich) August 6, 2012
The chocolate-based puns were fairly obvious, but still awesome for anyone who’s ever eaten a Mars Bar:
Mars rover Curiosity discovers first sign of life: a chocolate bar wrapper with the slogan “an Earth a day helps you work, rest and play”.
— Donna Bowater (@DonnaBow) August 6, 2012
BREAKING: Mars Rover reveals planet not made of chocolate, nougat and caramel. “We’re shocked”- manufacturers.
— Philip O’Connor (@philipoconnor) August 6, 2012
Mars was one of the first planets where we looked for extra terrestrial life. Given that finding out if there ever was life on the planet is part of Curiosity’s mission, it’s hardly surprising that there was a joke about it killing the one form of life on the planet:
NASA discovers extra-terrestrial feline life on mars, unfortunately their new Mars rover landed on top of it, killing the specimen.
— Edmund Ward (@hudcrab) August 6, 2012
