Category Archives: Space participation

Activism, Mars, Space participation

Uwingu launches “Beam Me to Mars” project

An announcement from Uwingu:

Uwingu Launches “Beam Me to Mars” Project
First opportunity for the people of Earth to radio personal
messages and pictures to Mars!

Boulder, Colorado – 19 August 2014 – Space company Uwingu announced today the launch of a project allowing anyone, anywhere to be a part of a global ”shout-out” of messages from the people of Earth to Mars on November 28th. The project is called ”Beam Me to Mars“.

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Beam Me to Mars (hashtag #BeamMe2Mars) celebrates the 50th anniversary of the start of humankind’s exploration of Mars with the launch of NASA’s Mariner 4 – the first successful Mars mission – on November 28th, 1964.

Beam Messages can be as simple as a name, or can be more elaborate, including text and even images. Anyone can send messages to Mars, and people can send as many as they want, there is no limit. Pricing begins at $5. To be included in the transmission messages and pictures must be submitted to Uwingu’s web site at www.uwingu.com by 5 November 2014.

Uwingu’s Beam Me transmission will be sent on November 28th. All messages will be sent at a rate of 1 million bits per second to Mars by Uwingu’s Beam Me transmission partner, satellite communications provider Universal Space Network (http://www.sscspace.com/universalspacenetwork).

Mariner 4 (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mariner_4) took almost 8 months to reach Mars in 1964-1965, but our 21st century Beam Me to Mars messages will arrive at the speed of light – just 15 minutes after they are sent!

Beam Me to Mars is the first opportunity for the people of Earth to radio personal messages and pictures to Mars.

Although no one is living on Mars yet to receive the Beam Me messages, here on Earth people will hear the messages loud and clear: All Beam Me messages will be delivered by hand to Congress, to NASA, and to the United Nations.

Moreover, the entire Beam Me message archive is searchable for free from Uwingu’s web site, and all the messages can be freely socially shared with friends, relatives, or anyone on social networks.

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Said Uwingu CEO and planetary scientist Dr. Alan Stern, “Come and celebrate the exploration of Mars in this very special, first of a kind 21st century interplanetary social movement! What will kids and adults say to Mars, about Mars, about space exploration’s past and future, about their hopes and dreams? We’re going to find out with a societal selfie we’re beaming to Mars!”

As with all Uwingu projects, half the proceeds fuel grants that Uwingu makes to further space research, education, and exploration; the other half fuels new Uwingu projects.

[See also the Beam Me To Mars FAQ – Uwingu.]

About Uwingu: Uwingu (which means “sky” in Swahili, and is pronounced “oo-wing-g0o”) was founded in 2012 and consists of a team of leading astronomers, planetary scientists, former space program executives and educators. Uwingu is a for-profit company dedicated to creating new ways for people to personally connect with space exploration and education while also raising funds to support non-profit organizations working space exploration and astronomy. A pioneer in this industry, Uwingu is currently creating the first crowd-sourced map of Mars. Since the project began in February 2014, individuals have named over 12,000 craters and the Uwingu Fund has already allocated over $100,000 for grants. Visit Uwingu’s website to learn more at www.uwingu.com.

Education, Eyes in the Sky, Space participation

Citizen science: Help classify ISS nighttime images of earth

The Cities at Night from the ISS program has organized a citizen science campaign to classify images taken of earth by astronauts on the ISS at night: Image overload: Help us, NASA says – CNN.com

The images come from the gallery of 1.8M images in the The Gateway to Astronaut Photography of Earth collection at Johnson Space Center. The campaign is called Project: Dark Skies ISS.

Right now there are around 1,800,000 images at the Johnson Space Center database (The Gateway of the Astronauts). Around 1,200,000 images were taken aboard the ISS (date 02/20/2014). However, the number of classified images is much smaller, and there is no archive of georeferenced images. There is already a project to classify the daytime images (Image detective), but the techniques used in that project are not useful for the classification of nighttime images. The patterns on Earth are not the same during the day and night, which is why another technique is needed to classify these nighttime images.

Our main objective is to study light pollution that comes from cities. We want to stop the waste of energy and the destruction of the mighty ecosystem.

Your collaboration is really important because algorithms cannot distinguish between stars, cities, and other objects (i.e. moon). Thus, we need your help to assess the light pollution in our world!

For more information, please contact www.citiesatnight.org or Twitter handle: @cities4tnight.

Also you can contribute on our other apps Lost at night (find unlocated images) and NightCitiesISS (Georeference known cities). Also you can track the project’s updates at our blog.

This CNN video shows a sample of earth images in the gallery:

DIY space, Rockets, Space participation

Video: Review of Copenhagen Suborbital’s HEAT 2X engine test

Here is an official video from Copenhagen Suborbitals about the engine test last Saturday (see earlier post):

DIY space, Rockets, Space participation

Video: Copenhagen Suborbitals engine test

Copenhagen Suborbitals did a static test firing today of their HEAT-2X rocket, which burns liquid oxygen and ethanol. The caption of the video says, “Unfortunately not a nominal burn.”

Update: A report (translated from Danish) on what happened during the test: HEAT2X static test – Preliminary information – Google Translate

Asteroids & Comets, Software, Space participation

NASA’s Asteroid Grand Challenge

NASA and topcoder are sponsoring the Asteroid Grand Challenge:

The Asteroid Grand Challenge Series will be comprised of a series of topcoder challenges to get more people from around the planet involved in finding all asteroid threats to human populations and figuring out what to do about them. In an increasingly connected world, NASA recognizes the value of the public as a partner in addressing some of the country’s most pressing challenges. 

For example, there is the AsteroidDataHunter challenge, which

tasks competitors to develop significantly improved algorithms to identify asteroids in images from ground-based telescopes. The winning solution must increase the detection sensitivity, minimize the number of false positives, ignore imperfections in the data, and run effectively on all computers – 

This video explains the basics of the Asteroid Grand Challenge: