It's been a fair while since NASA was in the news for anything, well, new. It was ages since they'd done any space shuttle launches, and people seem to have gotten bored with those anyways. Who cares about some guy floating about in a tin can in space? Unless he's covering David Bowie in zero gravity, anyway. Then the Curiosity rover mission began and that piqued people's, erm...interest, yeah. The car-sized robot got launched into the great black nothing and successfully landed on the red planet Mars in late 2012, and has since been doing a bunch of important science-y stuff which we don't claim to understand but is probably going to lead to some breakthroughs and the like. Oh and it drew some willies in the sand. All of which you probably knew since, like we say, the Mars rover netted NASA some much-needed column inches for the first time in yonks. What you probably didn't know is how they interact with the space-bound robot - not with radio messages or whatever because, y'know, it's a robot. Instead, it sends text messages. Like, SMS-style. Obviously a little more sophisticated than that, since it has to travel across the solar system, and there aren't any emojis used (so far as we know) but yep, we all communicate in much the same was as the Curiosity rover. Unless we've all moved onto WhatsApp by now.
Tom Baker is the Comics Editor at WhatCulture! He's heard all the Doctor Who jokes, but not many about Randall and Hopkirk. He also blogs at http://communibearsilostate.wordpress.com/
