Tonight, at the 6th Annual Crunchies Awards, the Mars Curiosity won for Best Technology Achievement. Because, you know, science is awesome.
Presented by former Square COO Keith Rabois and VentureBeat’s Meghan Kelly, NASA “Mohawk Guy” Bobak Ferdowsi accepted the award on behalf of the whole Mars Curiosity team.
“It’s been a real pleasure to work on this project, and we’re glad you think so too,” Ferdowsi said.
The Curiosity rover landed on Mars on August 6th, 2012, and in true robotic diva fashion, immediately started tweeting and sharing photos. It later even checked into Mars on Foursquare. Faced with massive budget cuts, NASA wisely turned to social media to bring attention to its important cause. And in many ways it’s seemingly worked. The Curiosity has 1.2M followers on Twitter and 483k Likes on Facebook.
The massive Mars rover bested other notable achievements from 2012 including Felix Baumgartner’s jump from 39 km up, SpaceX’s successful docking with the International Space Station, Tesla’s Supercharger EV charging network, and Google’s forward-thinking Google Glass.