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How Popular is the Mars Exploration Program?
We have certainly seen a lot of media coverage about Opportunity and
Spirit on Mars. But how popular is the program -- how many people are actually following it? While I have been following it hour by hour, how many people are doing the same? To find out, I conducted some informal surveys that you may be interested in. First, I asked Google how many sites link to the Mars Rover Exploration Home page: http://marsrovers.jpl.nasa.gov The answer: 4,830. This compares with 94K to the main NASA site, 51K to the whitehouse, 104K to CNN, 763 to Madonnas site, 13K to walmart, and 19K to JPL homepage, and 36K to Amazon. So according to that criteria, it is more popular than Madonna, but less popular than most other top sites on the web. Currently Google has 1620 hits for "Mars Rover Opportunity" and 37,300 links for "Mars Rover Spirit." That is in comparison to 12E6 hits for NASA and 86K for the Flinstones. However, remember google only crawls a site, on average, every six weeks or so, indicating that there may simply be a bias in these results, and that with time we will be able to actually tell how popular the topic is. Another recent popular story, for example, Shark victim Bethany Hamilton, only results in 5.2K hits. Google news is much more up to date than its search engine: There are 767 hits for Mars Rover Spirit and 57 for Mars Rover Opportunity. Another index of a topic's popularity is how commercialized it is. I only found a few stores on Google that are featuring products related to Spirit and Opportunity. The one that looked the most interesting is http://www.cafeshops.com/spitzer/232387 for Opportunity and http://www.cafeshops.com/spitzer/222101 for Spirit. Yahoo also has some good stores, although the NASA site seemed void of prodcuts for purchase. This morning at 10 AM EST I met with some friends to go for a long run. Interestly, most had already seen images of spirit, less than a few hours old. Not bad, although most were scientists. How popular do you think these expeditions are? Are they catching the hearts and minds of everyday people? |
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