Over at Wired’s Underwire blog, Angela Watercutter spoke with Bobak Ferdowsi, NASA’s supercool mohawked mission to Mars activity lead, about his newly acquired celeb status.
Of whether such sudden internet fame was something he’d expected:
No! Funny story, actually at work we sometimes — to make things more lively — we make our own memes about some of the things that are going on with our projects. Like, if we find a good photo of the rover where it looks particularly human or whatever else or sad, we’ll make it like “Rover Problems,” or we’ll put some sort of caption on it. They’re probably not as funny to the outside world as they are to us. So it’s hilarious to be a meme myself.
Of how his colleagues are dealing with it:
The other day we were sitting in the operations room and we were down-linking images from the orbiters, and we’re getting that data down and somebody was like, “We’re getting a new picture, let me process it and put it on the screen.” It’s a picture of me superimposed on the poster for Brokeback Mountain that says “Bobak Mountain” — I think people were laughing for a solid five or 10 minutes.
Of his crazy awesome hair style:
I’ve been doing fun haircuts for various parts of the mission; for example, if we have a big system test, each time we’d have one of those I’d, like, shave maybe the number of the test into the side of my head, or maybe an acronym for something big in that test. For the launch it was red and gold — it was meant to look like a rocket with a plume coming out.
Dude is cool. And there’s lots more interview over at Wired, so go check it out! [Wired]
Image via 9gag