Reaching out to people using social media, like blogs and Twitter, is nothing new to the techies working behind the scenes at NASA.

This spring, astronaut Mike Massimino, a mission specialist onboard space shuttle Atlantis became the first person to .

And engineers working on robotic Mars rovers and others and Mars Science Laboratory have been posting updates on Twitter for quite some time. For instance, the about the before it froze to death on the red planet last fall pulled in more than 43,000 followers.