posted 08-19-2014 10:07 AM               

Beam your message to Mars to celebrate 50 years since first mission to Red Planet

How are you planning to celebrate the 50th anniversary of the first successful mission to Mars? How about sending a "shout out" to the Red Planet?

"Beam Me to Mars," the latest project by Uwingu, a space research funding company, will transmit public messages to Mars on Nov. 28, 2014, 50 years (to the day) after the start of the Mariner 4 mission. The NASA probe made the first flyby of another planet, beaming back the first photos of the Martian surface.

"Come and celebrate the exploration of Mars in this very special, first of a kind 21st century interplanetary social movement!" Uwingu's chief executive officer Alan Stern said.

posted 11-24-2014 12:53 PM               

90,000 'Beam Me to Mars' messages mark 50 years of Red Planet exploration

Fifty years after the launch of the first successful mission to Mars, nearly 90,000 messages celebrating the anniversary and the future of human Mars exploration will be beamed to the Red Planet.

The radio transmission, which is the conclusion of a three-month campaign by the space research funding company Uwingu, will take place on Friday (Nov. 28), a half-century after NASA's Mariner 4 spacecraft lifted off to fly by Mars. The 1964 robotic mission transmitted the first photographs of the Martian surface.

Uwingu's broadcast to Mars, using high-power commercial transmitters in Hawaii, Alaska and Australia, is scheduled to begin just after 3 p.m. EST (2000 GMT) on Friday, and will be repeated twice. Whereas it took the Mariner probe eight months to fly to Mars, Uwingu's "Beam Me To Mars" messages will span the same distance in just 15 minutes, 'traveling' at a rate of 1 million bits per second.

The transmission will be the first time that messages from people on Earth have been transmitted to Mars by radio.