Today at 8am Pacific President Obama called the Mars Curiosity Rover team to congratulate them on the amazing feat that they accomplished on August 5. After commending their hard work and genius as a symbol of America's space prowess and innovation, he finished his call with this:

If in fact you do make contact with Martians, please tell me know right away.

Then he added "I got a lot other things on my plate, but I can say that... that would go to the top of the list... even if they are just microbes." Of course, discovering alien life would definitely change the course of the election—not to talk history.


NASA's JPL team laughed at his quip, but I'm sure they were hoping to hear something like "and to thank you we are going to give you $1 trillion so you can take us to Mars for real" instead. Or at least "and here's 2.7 billion more to take a submarine robot to [Jupiter's moon] Europa."


Note: remember that we are having Adam Steltzner answering your questions later today. Stay tuned!

Here's the clip with his exact words: