NASA Plays The Doors & Anthrax On Mars

Want to know what kind of tunes a space explorer uses as the soundtrack to boldly go where no man has gone before? David Bowie’s ‘Space Oddity’? More like, ‘Life on Mars’.

NME reports that NASA has revealed that they used a number of artists to help ‘wake up’ the Mars Curiosity robot each morning.

Part of NASA’s current exploration of the Red Planet from last month, the space buggy known as Curiosity enjoys her own little musical morning alarm each day from some of music’s biggest and brightest stars (excuse the pun).

As part of community news website Reddit‘s popular ‘Ask Me Anything’ (AMA) series, the engineers and scientists behind the NASA rover mission revealed what’s on the space-bound robot’s playlist.

NASA employee Eric Blood, who works in surface systems, unveiled the playlist of ‘wake-up’calls’ for the remote-controlled rover saying the robot was “less cranky with a good wakeup song.”

The ‘wake-up’ list included The Beatles classic Sgt. Pepper’s cut “Good Morning, Good Morning” as well as the Singing In The Rain song of the same name. George Harrison also got the robot going with his 1987 hit single “Got My Mind Set On You”

Metal fans will be happy to know that Anthrax are now being played on Mars, with “Got The Time” part of Curiosity’s playlist, while The Doors’ “Break On Through” was featured along with Simon and Garfunkel (“Wake Up Little Susie”), Frank Sinatra (“Come Fly With Me”) and John Williams’ classic Star Wars theme (but of course).

Its quite the well-rounded mixtape of classic if you ask us, making Curiosity quite the music connoisseur.

She’s a bit of a social media junkie too, with her own twitter account, which – as NME points out –  one Britney Spears used to get in touch with the space exploring robot ask, “does Mars look the same as it did in 2000?” based on her Mars-set video for ”Oops… I Did It Again”.

To which the NASA Robot replied:

@britneyspears Hey Brit Brit. Mars is still looking good. Maybe someday an astronaut will bring me a gift, too. Drill bits crossed ;)

— Curiosity Rover (@MarsCuriosity) August 15, 2012

You can view (and nod approvingly) at Curiosity’s full ‘wake-up’ playlsit – scheduled by day – below:

• Sol 2: “Good Morning Good Morning” Beatles, Sgt. Peppers Lonely Hearts Club
• Sol 3: “Good morning, good morning” from Singing in the Rain.
• Sol 5: Wagner “The ride of the valkyries” R10 Victory Song: Theme from “Mission Impossible”
• Sol 6: “Got the Time” by Anthrax, and “Echelon” by 30 Seconds to Mars
• Sol 7: The Doors – “Break on Through”, and George Harrison – “Got My Mind Set on You”
• Sol 8: Theme from Star Wars by John Williams
• Sol 9: Wake Up Little Susie by Simon and Garfunkel
• Sol 10: Frank Sinatra “Come Fly with me”