Giant Freakin Robot

The Mars Curiosity Rover has already achieved the primary goals of its mission. Because of its exploration and analysis of soil samples, as well as those taken from deep beneath the surface of various locations, scientists have been able to determine that the Red Planet would indeed have been a suitable host for life. Granted that would have been billions of years ago, but still, that’s big news for science.

So now, having completed its job, this has become something of a working vacation for Curiosity. The adorable little guy has been travelling around, and, like any good tourist, has been taking copious amounts of photographs to show the folks back home. Only instead of scrapbook after scrapbook full of shots of the Grand Canyon, the view from the Empire State Building, or sunburned Midwesterners on a tropical beach, the photos just happen to be more stunning panoramas of the Martian landscape. That’s a vacation most of us probably won’t be able to afford anytime in the near future.

There have been some exciting landmarks in space exploration in the past year or so. Private corporations like SpaceX have proven that they’re dead serious about their commitment to pushing space exploration forward in a way many of the major governments haven’t tried in a long time. We’ve had headlines that a few years ago would have read like outright science fiction, from a reality show that wants to give people a one-way trip to Mars, to a plan to mine freakin’ asteroids that includes James Cameron among its supporters. That latter jaw-dropper is under the auspices of the company Planetary Resources, and The Atlantic interviewed PR co-founder Eric Anderson a while back about the coming age of space exploration, expansion, and even colonization.

For those of you out there with something to say in the written form, particularly the three-line haiku written form, then your 17-syllable masterpiece could end up on Mars. No, not that Mars. The planet Mars.

As part of their upcoming Mars Atmosphere and Volatile Evolution (MAVEN) spacecraft launching in November, NASA is encouraging anybody who is interested to submit their name and a haiku poem to be put on a DVD that will make the flight to Mars as a part of the MAVEN mission. This will be the first time anyone will attempt to explore Mars’ upper atmosphere.

“This new campaign is a great opportunity to reach the next generation of explorers and excite them about science, technology, engineering and math,” said MAVEN’s principal investigator, Bruce Jakosky. “I look forward to sharing our science with the worldwide community as MAVEN begins to piece together what happened to the Red Planet’s atmosphere.”

When the Dutch nonprofit Mars One first announced they’d be taking applications for those interested in taking a permanent trip to Mars by 2023, the idea seemed like more of a novelty than a reality. But now that the application process has been going on for some days, the overwhelming response has made me realize that, even if this project doesn’t reach its goals, we’ll still be getting a reality show out of it. So it’s like lose-lose, right?

So, how responsive were potential Marstronauts? Well over 20,000 people have reportedly submitted their one-minute videos and their $25 entry fees. Bas Lansdorp and Arno Wielders, co-founders of Mars One, aim to get as many as 500,000 applications, if not more so, in the next two years of the selection process. They will eventually whittle all the applicants down to 24, and those 24 will receive astronaut training in front of a worldwide audience, who will then see that group shrink down to the four final Mars settlers. They’re also trying to raise $6 billion to get their project fully funded, and while that’s a huge number at the outset, only 240 million people need to apply in order for that goal to be reached. So tell your family and 240 million of your closest friends about it.

Also of note is the high level of interest in China, where over 600 citizens have applied. Not a huge number for such a populated country, but they’re also very young in the space race, and as a nation, they tend to do well with new technologies in a short time.