Camilla at 124,000 feet during her fifth trip to the edge of space. (Image: Earth to Sky Calculus)
Without a shiny new rover prancing around on Mars shooting rocks with lasers, it can be tough for other NASA missions to get any attention these days. So theSolar Dynamics Observatory has turned to a rubber chicken for help.
But this is no ordinary rubber chicken. Known as Camilla Corona, SDOs chicken mascot has flown five times to the uppermost levels of the atmosphere in a hot air balloon, flown in a rolling NASA T-38 Talon with astronauts, and traveled around the world attending space-related conferences, meetups, and tweetups.
A lesser chicken might not be able to handle such a rigorous schedule of constantly blogging, tweeting, and traveling. A lesser chicken might be too, well, chicken to fly solo to the edge of space in a hot air balloon in the midst of a solar radiation storm. But Camilla is gearing up for what will hopefully be her biggest adventure yet: going to the International Space Station.
Everything Camilla does is done in the name of public outreach: from encouraging people to ask questions, to inspiring children particularly other girls to be interested in STEM subjects, to educating her many followers not only about the sun and solar weather but about all NASA missions. The fact that she has succeeded in touching not only the public but astronauts and scientists within NASA along the way proves that a little social media strategy and a lot of personality can go a long way.
Astronaut Reid Wiseman, part of the upcoming Expedition 40/41, scheduled for May 2014, is trying to help Camilla realize her dream of spaceflight. Hes helping her train while SDO works on getting her certified to fly with him on the Russian spacecraft. Im hoping to take her up to the ISS and give her a good view, he said in a phone interview from the Yuri Gagarin Cosmonaut Center in Star City, Russia.
Wiseman had followed Camilla on Twitter for some time when in February he met her in person by chance at an event at the Johnson Space Center. He was already training for his first expedition, so he decided to try to help get her into space too. He volunteered to take her with him to Star City to train at the Soyuz spacecraft ground school.
While in Star City, Camilla attended classes with Wiseman, learned about the intricacies of toilets in space, and mingled with other astronauts and officials from the Russian space agency. This chicken has some weird addictive quality that goes across borders and language barriers, Wiseman said. I took her to Red Square one day and it was unbelievable. He said he was constantly surrounded by people who wanted to take pictures of Camilla, most of whom had no idea what his or Camillas story was.
So how did Camilla go from anonymous rubber chicken to astronaut-in-training? Romeo Durscher, senior manager at SDO and executive assistant to Camilla, says that Camillas social media efforts began in late 2009, before the official launch of the mission. They had decided to make Camilla their mascot, something which initially started as an inside joke among the SDO team. But they quickly realized social media was an opportunity to teach the public about the sun and solar weather and that Camilla the hilariously adorable chicken that she was could be a great teacher.
What Durscher and the rest of the SDO team did not expect was just how popular Camilla would become. We didnt know how the public would react to a rubber chicken, said Durscher. It caught me completely by surprise. Within a year, she had developed a sizable following on Twitter, and it wasnt uncommon to see people kids, adults, and astronauts alike lined up to get photos taken with Camilla at NASA events.
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