quote:
Only Five More Days for Your Name to Rise With the DawnNASA's campaign to send the nom de plumes of people from around the world into the heart of the asteroid belt ends Sat., Nov. 4.
Submitted names will be carried on board NASA's Dawn, the first spacecraft to travel between and scrutinize two distinct worlds. Mission scientists are confident Dawn observations of asteroid Vesta and dwarf planet Ceres will answer basic questions about the nature and composition of these celestial wanderers.
"How many chances do you get to fly into the very heart of the asteroid belt?" said Keyur Patel, Dawn project manager at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, Calif. "When the craft is launched in June 2007, yours and the names of your loved ones can hitch along for the ride and be part of space exploration history."
Dawn will carry a silicon chip containing the names of asteroid, space and other enthusiasts from around the world. People may submit their names for this historic one-way mission by visiting JPL's Dawn Web site now through Nov. 4 at http://dawn.jpl.nasa.gov . More than 170,000 people have already signed up for the asteroid belt tour.
Following launch, Dawn will employ an ion engine to propel it during its more than four year, 3-billion-kilometer journey (1.9-billion miles) to its first target – asteroid Vesta. After months of detailed scientific observation of Vesta, Dawn's ion engine will fire up again, and send it on its way for a 2014 rendezvous with Ceres, recently anointed a "dwarf planet" by the International Astronomical Union.
"This campaign will allow people from around the world to become directly involved with Dawn, and through that, become familiar with the mission's science," said University of California Los Angeles professor Dr. Chris Russell, Dawn's principal investigator.
The Dawn mission is managed by JPL, a division of the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena, for NASA's Science Mission Directorate, Washington. The University of California Los Angeles is responsible for overall Dawn mission science. Orbital Sciences Corporation of Dulles, Virginia, designed and built the Dawn spacecraft. For information about NASA and other space flight missions on the Internet, visit http://www.nasa.gov
Planetary Society release quote:
Fly Your Name on NASA's Phoenix Mission to MarsOne day, humans will land on Mars, and when they do, a message will be waiting for them.
In 2007, The Planetary Society will send a specialized silica-glass DVD to Mars aboard Phoenix, NASA's newest Scout mission, led by Principal Investigator Peter Smith at the University of Arizona. The disk, which is attached to the deck of the Phoenix lander, will include "Visions of Mars," a collection of 19th and 20th century stories, essays, and art inspired by the Red Planet. The disk also includes special features, such as the famous 1938 radio broadcast of HG Wells' classic, "War of the Worlds."
People around the world can add their own names (or those of family and friends) to the archival disk that features the works of such visionaries as The Planetary Society's co-founder Carl Sagan, Isaac Asimov, Ray Bradbury, Arthur C. Clarke, Percival Lowell, and many more. The Planetary Society is collecting up to several million names to send on the Mars-bound DVD. Visit The Planetary Society's website to fly a name to Mars.
Phoenix will be the first lander to explore the Martian arctic, landing near 70 degrees north latitude. Designed to search for and study water ice, the spacecraft is a fixed lander with a suite of advanced instruments and a robotic arm that can dig up to a meter into the soil. The Phoenix team hopes to uncover clues in the icy soil of the Martian arctic about the history of near surface ice and its potential for habitability. Launching in August 2007, Phoenix will land in May 2008. The DVD will also include a greeting and essay from the mission Principal Investigator, Peter Smith, and additional information about the Phoenix mission.
"Since the DVD will appear in some of the calibration images that Phoenix sends back from the surface, those who send their names will, in some sense, be able to see themselves on Mars!" said Bruce Betts, the Planetary Society's Director of Projects. "Well, sort of…"
The special disk should last for at least many hundreds of years on Mars, plenty of time for a future generation to discover and read the Red Planet's first library. Disk contents represent 20 nations and cultures.
Sending this DVD from Earth aboard Phoenix will be The Planetary Society's second attempt to cast this particular "message in a bottle" into the currents of space. "Visions of Mars" was created by the Society and placed aboard Russia's Mars 96 spacecraft. That mission failed shortly after launch. The Planetary Society has also helped collect names for several other space missions, including Stardust, the Mars Exploration Rovers, Deep Impact, Mars Pathfinder, and Cassini.
Anyone may submit names to The Planetary Society to fly to Mars, including - in addition to their own - the names of children and grandchildren, classmates, friends, loved ones who have passed, or even a favorite family pet. Once a name is entered on The Planetary Society website, a certificate, stating that name's inclusion on the Phoenix Mars DVD, can be downloaded.
The deadline for submitting names is February 1, 2007.
The Phoenix Mission is led by Principal Investigator Peter H. Smith of the University of Arizona, with project management at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory and development partnership with Lockheed Martin Space Systems. International contributions for Phoenix are provided by the Canadian Space Agency, the University of Neuchatel (Switzerland), the University of Copenhagen, and the Max Planck Institute in Germany.
posted 10-30-2006 08:12 PM
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