Every Year on August 5th, the Curiosity Rover Sings a Lonely Birthday Song | Hacker News Reader

Every Year on August 5th, the Curiosity Rover Sings a Lonely Birthday Song

curiosity.com

87 pointss_q_b35 comments

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!

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

https://imgur.com/VbKV9DF https://i.imgur.com/VZvj5S7.jpg

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

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

Wall-E basically got that done

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.

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

The song was recently found to be in the public domain. See e.g. http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2016/02/happy-birthday-is...

Not played in the US? So no issue

So, still not an issue.

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

"on Earth"

Kind of hard to serve papers on a non-sentient object on another planet.

(Not that that would stop lawyers if they were getting paid for it.)

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

NASA wins best demo ever.

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

"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...

The first steps are often the hardest to make :)

How do you figure? You trailed off at the end without finishing your thought. I'd love to hear why you don't think it's a huge accomplishment.

Sorry about that! I do feel it is a huge accomplishment. Full stop. It is the interstellar part that puzzled me. Why not intergalactic? Of course it is a huge first step in both directions, and so are computers, the wheel and various technologies for that matter. However, we're still warming up in our stellar system.

Most people are weak on the difference between intra- and inter-. It's in the set of things I don't even consider trying to go grammar-nazi on because it's so widespread it's arguably correct now, and the "real" distinction is merely jargon used by several subcommunities.

People en masse will be clearer on finer points of language if those who already grasp them make the effort to polish their communications. Don't mistake lack of awareness for stupidity. Most people learn by example.

Corollary: every wrong apostrophe breed's another.

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.

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

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 :)

http://cosmiclog.nbcnews.com/_news/2012/04/04/11023933-how-w...

http://www.sciencemag.org/news/2006/06/mars-no-one-can-hear-...

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

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

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/

Happy versions here; https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12239358

Counterpoint http://thebaconsandwichofregret.tumblr.com/post/132121475325...

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.

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.

That's really poignant.

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.

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.

(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.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com