It's pretty easy to get people to pay attention when NASA does something big; the press will happily jump on both major discoveries and mishaps. But the actual research process is typically a collection of small triumphs and tragedies; conveying that to the public is much harder. With the Mars Phoenix Lander, NASA used Twitter, a microblogging service, to get its message out, and the Twitter feed attracted nearly 40,000 followers. Ars talked with the JPL's Veronica McGregor about the experience.

The decision to tweet

The initial idea of using Twitter was part of a general NASA trend to go directly to the public in new ways. In what McGregor described as "the good old days"—"I always laugh when I think that the 'old days' means 2001," she said—publicity was mostly handled through a one-way feed of text and video releases to the media. They now have both a standard-definition and hi-def video feed on iTunes and have started a YouTube channel.

Back in March, when the Cassini mission, which orbits Saturn, was doing a close flyby to check out the geysers of the moon Enceladus, the team tried running a blog of the event. They found it to be far too time-intensive, requiring a constant cycle of talking to scientists, running posts past editors, working with the web team, etc.

"We wanted to keep going with the blogs, but we were definitely open for ideas on other products that we could do that might not be so time intensive for the staff," McGregor said.

When a staff member suggested it, the team checked out Twitter (nobody was quite sure how it operated). Although McGregor said the limits on text were appealing, "the real selling point was the fact that the updates could go directly to people's cell phones. The reason that was so thrilling for me was that we were landing on the Sunday of Memorial Day weekend. Holiday weekends are when readership and viewership for news just really goes down—people aren't paying attention, they're on vacation." Twitter meant that they could reach these people, even if they were at the beach.

McGregor manages the news office at the JPL, which made her the obvious choice to run the Twitter feed, since she has to approve everything that comes out of the office anyway. "It was probably just going to be easier to take out an extra step and for me to just do it myself," she said. She mentioned to the scientists and engineers in a pre-mission briefing that the tweets would happen, but she thinks that most of them just nodded politely.

Building an audience

McGregor set up the Twitter account a few weeks before landing and started providing updates on the engine firings that corrected Phoenix's course on its final approach. Her "advertising" took the form of a few notifications posted to space flight forums.

"Within a couple of days—literally within three days—we started seeing it show up on blogs," she said. "The founders of Twitter put it out on their feed, that they were following it, and Alexis Madrigal at Wired.com put it out on his blog, and we gained a few thousand followers within a few days."

McGregor remembers that she had the "new followers" e-mail notification turned on and "I went out to lunch one day, and I came back, and there were like a thousand e-mails in my inbox."

Since then, she's been printing out responses and sharing them with the JPL staff. When asked whether the scientists and engineers now know what Twitter, McGregor responded, "Oh, boy, do they ever." A lot of the comments she's received have come from people who say they have never followed a space mission before.

"The way the news media works is that we're going to get coverage only when there's a major mission event, or when there's a major mishap," she said. "The day-to-day operations of a mission almost never get reported. It was probably the first time they followed a mission because it was almost the first time they've had access to the day-to-day happenings."

McGregor complimented her Twitter audience, calling them intelligent and witty. "They kept me as entertained as hopefully Mars Phoenix kept them," she said. Referring to the audience, she said that, "as people were learning about Phoenix, I was learning so much back from them about what resonated with them."

The value of tweeting

Summing up the experience, McGregor said, "It's really just a powerful way of distributing news and information." Since the Phoenix's final tweet, it has picked up over 1,200 new followers; not a single one has dropped off. McGregor plans on continuing to update the feed as some of the data gathered during its operations gets analyzed.

One of the foremost examples of the value of the tweets came when rumors started circulating that Phoenix had discovered evidence that spoke to the possibility of life on Mars. Those rumors spun out of control over the course of a weekend—NASA arranged a press conference for the week, but had no obvious way of addressing the speculation before then. McGregor got permission to release a tweet (while she was on vacation with her kids) over the weekend and was able to get the word out, using the traditional first-person phrasing that makes it sound as if the lander itself were speaking.

"After I did post the correct information to Twitter, I saw so many postings at Digg and in blogs where people said 'the Mars Phoenix has told us that this story is wrong,'" McGregor said. "It just showed me that people did trust what we were saying there. And that's a big message that I'm taking back to NASA headquarters."

Meanwhile, the use of Twitter is expanding at the JPL. The Mars rovers have an account, as does Cassini and the work-in-progress that will be the next rover to explore the red planet, the Mars Science Laboratory. NASA has a page that lists all of the missions that have feeds.