Since it gets quite lonely on Mars, NASA has programmed the Curiosity rover to sing itself “Happy Birthday” every year.

To sing the famous tune, NASA researchers from the Goddard Space Flight Center used the Curiosity’s Sample Analysis on Mars (SAM) system. According to Discovery, who reported on Curiosity’s first birthday in 2013:

Using the Sample Analysis on Mars (SAM) instrument, the most sophisticated chemistry lab ever to be sent to Mars, scientists have programmed it to resonate at varying frequencies that correspond to the notes of the famous birthday song. Usually, this resonance helps finely-ground samples of Mars dirt to filter through SAM for analysis — today, it had a whole different use.

For the rover’s first birthday, it hummed the tune to itself inside a Martian crater 208 million miles away from Earth. It was the loneliest birthday celebration in the Solar System, which is both astonishing and sad. TechCrunch sums it up elegantly:

Thus one of our species’ crowning achievements – a rover that is the very avatar of all of our best and most far-reaching efforts – sang a 120-year-old folk song into the arid plains of Mars. The fact that this little robot will probably never make it back home and is completely alone is a fascinating study in solitude but, what’s more important, that it is able to sing to itself by reacting to commands sent from Earth is stunning. We are, in essence, on Mars with the little rover and that’s probably the best birthday present we could get.

Curiosity will sing the song again on August 5. Check out the video below to hear the rover’s rendition in full.

Cake image: slgckgc