Mars. I’m finally going. Yep – got my boarding pass and everything – departing from the launch site at Cape Canaveral Airforce Station in Florida in July 2020 on an Atlas V-541 rocket. We’ll achieve Earth orbit and hurtle out into space, arriving at Jezero Crater in February 2021. The mission? To search for signs of past microbial life, characterize the planet’s climate and geology, collect samples for future return to Earth, and pave the way for human exploration of the Red Planet. The stuff dreams are made of.
I remember staring enthralled at the projector screen in my 6th grade class in Adams Elementary School. An animated Disney educational film projected three-stage rockets striking out for Mars by the year 2000. I licked the tip of my pencil and did the math. I’d be forty-nine years old and wondered if that would be too old to make the flight.
True, NASA is running 20 years behind schedule and, true, I won’t actually be setting foot on the red planet myself. But my name, preserved on a silicon microchip, will make the trip and set down with the Mars 2020 Rover. And not only do I have a hard copy boarding pass (NASA M2M963157163335) and a high definition mission patch, but I earned 313,586.649 frequent flier points to boot.
Of course, I’m not travelling alone. I expect to be in good company. Children of all ages, enthusiastic for a piece of the future, began signing up Tuesday, May 21. The Microdevices Laboratory at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) in Pasadena, California will use an electron beam to etch the submitted names onto a silicon chip with lines of text smaller than one-thousandth the width of a human hair (75 nanometres). More than a million names can be inscribed on a single dime-sized microchip, which will ride on the rover under a glass cover. Space (so to speak) is limited and the window closes September 30.
NASA will use Mars 2020 and other missions to prepare for human exploration of the Red Planet. As another step toward that goal, NASA is returning American astronauts to the moon in 2024. Government, industry and international partners will join NASA in a global effort to build and test the systems needed for human missions to Mars and beyond.
Of course, one could always wait for NASA’s Space Launch System and Orion “manned” exploration vehicles, currently scheduled for some time in the 2030s.
Personally? I’m not sure I can wait that long. Then again, you never know… after all, I do have a head start with “redeemable” frequent flier mileage.
Information on the Mars 2020 mission to Jezero Crater and links to access boarding passes are available at: https://go.nasa.gov/Mars2020Pass and https://www.nasa.gov/mars2020.
Mike Howard is a travel journalist working out of the Pacific Northwest. He has authored multiple “Custom Guides” for Trip.com (Malta, Victoria, BC and Surrounds, Seattle and the Olympic Peninsula, Montenegro and Germany) and is a destination expert for those regions.
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