I presume the following report in The Guardian is a spoof for the purposes of discussing the newly-released Hitchhiker sequel, but I don't know...
In one of its less-reported actions last week, Nasa's LCROSS lunar mission last week gave Douglas Adams's Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy the extra-planetary exposure it has always deserved. A Twitter feed from the satellite sent crashing onto the moon's surface on Friday channelled the voice of an improbably created sperm whale that discovers itself hurtling towards a different outer-space collision in Adams's much-loved story...Addendum: The Honest Hypocrite confirms that there really was an ongoing Twitter feed.
As Nasa's LCROSS spacecraft travelled towards the moon at more than 9,000 kilometres per hour on Friday afternoon, it tweeted in the whale's words: "And what's this thing coming toward me very fast? So big and flat and round ... it needs a big wide sounding name like 'Ow', 'Ownge', 'Round', 'Ground'! ... That's it! Ground! Ha! I wonder if it'll be friends with me?"
It's true. I had followed the twitter feed for months and was following the feed as LCROSS went down. Over the span of the mission person who was in charge of the twitter feed for LCROSS would have LCROSS quote eclectic songs, often about the moon and traveling, and generally be very quippy.
ReplyDeleteIt seemed to me to be eerie to anthropomorphisize an object that was headed for its destruction.