Dec. 5, 2008 -- If the Phoenix Lander comes back to life on Mars, Twitter users could be among the first to know.
NASA gave the historic Space Age mission an Internet Age spin by adding a Twitter page, enabling the robotic interplanetary explorer to answer the hot micro-blogging Web site's trademark query: "What are you doing?"
Twitter rocketed to popularity with technology that lets people use mobile telephones or personal computers to continually keep friends updated on their activities with "tweets," text messages of no more than 140 characters.
When NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory News Services manager Veronica McGregor was tasked with delivering word of the agency's first-ever robotic landing on Mars during a holiday weekend, she turned to the social-networking Web site.
"Readership and viewership in traditional news media usually goes down over a three-day weekend," said McGregor, a former CNN correspondent.
"The fact that Twitter could send messages right to people's cell phones -- it seemed like a good idea to let people know about the landing."
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