One year ago on August 5 2012, the Curiosity Rover landed on Mars surface to begin its multi-year mission to acquire more information about the desert ridden red planet. The whole world was in on the celebration on that day as Curiosity took its first steps on a planet that could have been. Fast forward a year later and it’s Curiosity’s birthday — and it’s time to pop out the champagne and caviar once more.

The smart ladies and gentlemen at NASA found a cool way to celebrate the birthday of Curiosity. Instead of popping out the birthday hats and dancing away to the Blues, team came up with a way to make Curiosity play the happy birthday tune. Curiosity played the tune by using its Sample Analysis at Mars (SAM) tool, and if you were on mars during that time, you would have heard it, but you’re no Martian.

NASA tested the song on an identical SAM unit here on Earth before instructing Curiosity to entertain the Martian rocks and sand. We see it as a fun project and hope NASA does similar things with Curiosity every year for the foreseeable future.

In the next decade or less, we hope to have humans on Mars singing happy birthday along with taking cat and puppy photos, wouldn’t that be something.

[via YouTube]