Curiosity rover sending clever, informative tweets from Mars

(CNET) Coming off the tremendous success of completing the "seven minutes of terror," the Mars Curiosity rover will now spend the next several weeks getting settled before embarking on its data-collecting two-year mission. So what does a solitary rover in a Mars crater do during its downtime? Chat it up on Twitter with its peeps back home, of course.

Earlier today, the official Sesame Street Twitter account sent a shout-out to the rover on Twitter, amusingly suggesting the children's entertainment company hoped to see its famous fictional Martian Yip Yips characters emerge on camera during the latest ground pictures from Mars.

Curiosity rover quickly tweeted back: "Science is cool. Yip-yip-yip-yip... Uh-huh. Uh-huh. #STEM #MSL" (Even BoingBoing served up a satirical screenshot wonderfully Photoshopped of what a Yip Yip on Mars would look like; see our own vision at right.)

Of course, the Rover (with its 690,000-plus followers at the time of this writing) doesn't just mindlessly chatter, but also sends tweets and images to inform the public about upcoming technical procedures and mission statistics. The account also seemingly replies to nearly anyone if the question or comment gets its gears grinding.

Curiosity's tweets are, not surprisingly, getting retweeted like crazy -- this image from last night has been retweeted more than 30,000 times.

Could the Curiosity rover end up being the most comedic planet-hopping robot of our time?