14 DAY TRIAL // During a press conference this past June 23, a team chiefly comprised of students announced plans to send a time capsule to Mars sometime within the next five years.
More precisely, the folks behind the nonprofit organization Explore Mars hope that, with a little help from the general public, they will manage to send as many as three small satellites to the Red Planet.
Information shared with the public says that these satellites that Explore Mars hopes to deploy and successfully land on the surface of Mars are to carry images and videos provided by people all around the world.
Should the satellites successfully make it all the way to the Red Planet, Explore Mars expects that they will remain there and keep their integrity long enough to be able to greet the Red Planet's first colonists.
“Time Capsule to Mars™ (TC2M), a project of Explore Mars, will make history by connecting humanity’s shared history with our shared destiny,” the non-profit organization writes on the official website for this project.
“Carrying digital messages from tens of millions of people from all corners of Earth in the form of text, images, audio and video clips, the state-of-the-art 'time capsule' will remain a crucible of today’s human race – to be rediscovered by future colonists of the Red Planet,” it adds.
The only problem is that, in order to acquire the three satellites and send them flying towards the Red Planet, Explore Mars needs to raise funds amounting to an impressive $25 million (approximately €18.38 million).
Hoping to obtain this money, the team has launched a crowdfunding campaign and is asking that those who are passionate about space exploration consider getting behind this project and donating.
“Here’s your chance to help the world’s first student-led interplanetary mission get off the ground. Please donate what you can. No donation is too small. Every donation is one small step closer to our goal,” the Explore Mars team says.
According to Live Science, the team behind the Time Capsule to Mars project includes students from Duke University, Stanford University and the University of Connecticut. The headquarters for the initiative is the Space Propulsion Laboratory at MIT, Massachusetts, the same source tells us.
Thus, the satellites that Explore Mars plans to launch are dubbed CubeSats and will be fitted with an innovative propulsion system developed at said research center. For the time being, detailed information concerning when and from where the team hopes to launch the satellites is lacking.