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Curiosity Rover Makes First Foursquare Check-In On Another Planet

Posted by samzenpus on from the martian-marketing dept.

cylonlover writes "NASA launched a strategic partnership with location-based social networking site foursquare in 2010 with the first-ever check-in from the International Space Station (ISS) by astronaut Doug Wheelock. Now the space agency has gone one better with the first check-in on another planet thanks to its Curiosity Mars rover. Since fellow foursquare users will have a hard time checking in on the Red Planet themselves, they'll instead be able to earn a Curiosity-themed badge for visiting locations relating to science, technology, engineering and mathematics. The badge will be available later this year and is designed to spark the scientific curiosity of foursquare users by encouraging them to visit science centers, laboratories and museums."

5 of 92 comments (clear)

  1. Re:Most interesting part... by spacefight · · Score: 3, Informative

    Last modified Mon, 1 Nov, 2010 at 14:42 Nowhere it says on that article, that it is deployed... http://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/msl/news/msl20120817.html

  2. How sad by Rosco+P.+Coltrane · · Score: 4, Informative

    NASA should be doing pure science, and that should be reason enough to excite Joe Public. I mean hell, I can't get over the fact that I can see detailed images of Mars from the comfort of my own living room. If someone had told me that when I was a kid, I would never have believed it. Yet, there we are - humanity is there through its machines. It should blow people's minds!

    Instead of that, NASA is regularly forced to do shitty high-profile, useless and pathetic "interstellar internet" stunts with shitty dotcoms to attract attention, and presumably funding. That's how sad, uneducated and blaze people have become.

    --
    "A door is what a dog is perpetually on the wrong side of" - Ogden Nash
    1. Re:How sad by wbr1 · · Score: 2, Informative

      That's how sad, uneducated and blaze people have become.

      We are so on fire (blaze) we are not unimpressed or bored (blase).
      If you want to complain about the uneducated masses, at least use the correct words lest you be considered uneducated yourself.

      --
      Silence is a state of mime.
  3. Re:What is foursquare by Dogtanian · · Score: 4, Informative

    What is foursquare? I just looked and it looks like some cut-down facebook thingy

    It's basically the most self-indulgent, navel-gazing, self-important-attention-whoring, up-their-own-arse and downright pointless aspects of social media distilled to a level of 100% pure worthlessness.

    This is quite obviously another would-be public-attention-grabbing stunt along the lines of the Will.I.Am transmission a few weeks back, and it's open for debate which of the two are worse.

    --
    "Slashdot - News and Chat Sites Deviant". (Click "homepage" link above for details).
  4. Re:Most interesting part... by Whizziwig · · Score: 5, Informative

    there's now a planet enum internally (only mars + earth for now ... hopefully we go do something interesting on the moon again soon), and an alternate latlng field that we're storing the planet-specific coordinates in. The web rendering code knows to look for the astralLatLng if planet != earth. So that all our current clients and api consumers don't explode , we're pushing out the earth latlng of mission control via the public api.