There was only one thing inevitable about Nasa’s mission to Mars – and it was that the internet would find ways to gently mock it. Pranksters from across the world – with a little help from Photoshop – took the first images beamed back by the Curiosity Rover following its successful landing yesterday, and imagined the [...]

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Life on Mars (With a little help from Photoshop)

By Eddie Wrenn
Internet pranksters show how things could have been when Curiosity touched down
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There was only one thing inevitable about Nasa’s mission to Mars – and it was that the internet would find ways to gently mock it. Pranksters from across the world – with a little help from Photoshop – took the first images beamed back by the Curiosity Rover following its successful landing yesterday, and imagined the results if something a little unexpected had happened.

With their help, we now know what it would be like if the rover had landed to discover it had been beaten to the punch by the Vikings or – more chillingly – the aliens from the Aliens trilogy of films.

The images were posted on Imgure, the image sharing website regularly used for internet ‘memes’ – short-lived cultural phenomenons which create a flash-flood of copycats before dying off as the world moves on to something else.
A similar meme started when Nasa technician Bobak Ferdowsi and his eye-catching Mohawk haircut was spotted during the Mars coverage.

He quickly became a minor internet celebrity as fans alternately laughed and gushed over his hair-cut and obvious glee as the rover touched down safely.

Monday’s mission saw the Curiosity travel 352 million miles in eight-and-a-half months, before finally landing on Mars at 5.32 GMT (1.32 EDT).The high-tech craft hit the top of the Martian atmosphere at 13,000mph, and was then slowly lowered by a radical floating ‘sky crane’ before gently arriving in a massive crater.

The news was greeted with cheers and shouts in Nasa’s Pasadena Mission Control, and within seconds the craft had sent back the first pictures of its new home.

Star quality: Nasa engineer Bobak Ferdowsi, part of the team behind the Mars Curiosity landing, became an Internet sensation when a picture of him with stars shaved into the side of his head was beamed around the world

The Nasa robot will soon begin beaming high-definition images of the Red Planet’s surface in the next day or two.
Let us hope these types of images stay in the collective imaginations of web denizens – and doesn’t ever become a case of fiction becoming reality…

© Daily Mail, London




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