There’s nothing quite like a discovery announcement from the National Aeronautics and Space Administration to get people excited and taxpayer money flowing.

After NASA implored Twitter followers on June 6 to “Join us tomorrow at 2pm ET for a lively discussion about two new Mars science results from the @MarsCuriosity rover,” the crowd went wild. Headlines gushed that discoveries could “reveal life on Mars,” with endless hype over the “massive discovery.” And NASA was not innocent in ramping up fervor, embargoing results in the journal Science and urging the public to #askNASA.