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Ted Cruz's vacation and the Mars rover landing coincide in a meme

Traveling? In a pandemic?

Morgan Sung

on February 18, 2021

There may not be signs of life on Mars yet, but Twitter users had fun imagining it.

After seven months en route, NASA's Perseverance successfully landed on the red planet on Thursday. Perseverance is the fifth American rover on Mars, joining its predecessor Curiosity, which landed in 2012.

Soon after landing, Perseverance sent home photographs of its surroundings. The grainy black and white images may not look like much, but the dust is still settling from the landing and the rover needs more time to prepare its other two cameras to get clearer shots.

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Meanwhile on Earth, Texas Sen. Ted Cruz was rightfully flamed for vacationing in Cancún, Mexico while his constituents faced extreme winter weather and unprecedented power outages. Photos of Cruz waiting to board his plane back to Texas went viral as people expressed their anger that the senator appeared to abandon the people he's supposed to represent. One photo of Cruz strolling through the Cancún airport with his carry-on luggage became prime Photoshop material, and irate internet users began editing the senator into various backgrounds.

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The two landings coincided beautifully.

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And between the viral photo of Cruz and the new images of Mars, Twitter users began combining the two events into a meme fit for the chaos that is 2021.