Uwingu Furthering Space and Astronomy Education

CUSEDS and Astronomers Without Borders

Partner with Uwingu

Remember the Mars Map crater-naming initiative introduced by Uwingu a few weeks ago? You pay a few bucks, name a crater on their Mars map, and the proceeds go to help fund science education. We named a couple of craters (you can read about them here and here) and then found out that the maps with the names will be used by the Mars One people when they start sending their spacecraft to the Red Planet in a few years.

The fruits of this unique fundraiser are starting to ripen up. With approximately 500,000 craters originally available for personalized naming as a part of Uwingu’s Mars mapping project, the company hopes to raise $10 million for distribution in the form of grants to space scientists, educators, companies, and organizations. The opening weeks of fundraising through the Mars Map Crater Naming initiative has been good enough that Uwingu recently announced grants to the University of Colorado’s Students for the Exploration and Development of Space (CUSEDS) group, as well as the internationally known Astronomers Without Borders organization. Previous grants have gone to the International Dark-Sky Association (IDA), the Galileo Teachers Training Program (GTTP), the Search for Extraterrestrial  Intelligence (SETI), and the Mars One project.

Dr. Alan Stern, the CEO of Uwingu said, in announcing the grant to CUSEDS, “We’re very proud to award our first student grant from our latest project to SEDS students, an important university student organization dedicated to advancing space exploration, research, and education,” he said. “Given the popularity we’re seeing from people who want to help name craters on our new Mars map, we expect to generate many more grants as our Mars Map Crater Naming Project moves toward its goal of completing the naming of the over 500,000 unnamed, scientifically cataloged craters on Mars by the end of 2014, the 50th year of Mars exploration!”

That’s a lot of naming, and all for a good cause. So, What will CUSEDS do with their grant? Brandon Seifert, President of the group points out that it is involved in many education and outreach efforts. “We’re thankful for Uwingu’s generous grant and are excited to put it to use supporting local outreach initiatives, collegiate science experiments, and student/community events.”

Uwingu and Astronomers Without Borders

Astronomers Without Borders is a global astronomy community founded with the idea that boundaries between peoples and countries disappear when we all look up at the sky. Members include people from all walks of life on this globe, all celebrating our common celestial heritage. This international outreach is something that Uwingu wanted to encourage, and so the group awarded a grant to AWB from proceeds of the project’s first two weeks of public engagement, and has honored AWB with the first province to be named on its map. Prices for naming craters in the AWB province vary, depending on the size of the crater, and begin at $5 dollars.

You can find Astronomers Without Borders Province on Uwingu’s map of Mars in a heavily-cratered region on the edge of Chryse Planitia, not far from Vallis Marineris, with many features named for great astronomers and physicists.  Sagan and Galileo are two of the closest, along with Da VinciSchiaparelliCassiniFlammarionHuygens, and Halley. Other scientists are commemorated in nearby craters such as CurieRutherford, and Pasteur. This region on Mars also includes craters named after science fiction and entertainment greats AsimovOrson Welles, and Roddenberry.

To celebrate Global Astronomy Month (organized each year in April by AWB), the organizations are hoping to get all the craters named in the province by the end of the month. It’s a great way to pay forward the investment all of us made in Uwingu with our crater names on the Mars map, and to further Uwingu’s aims of funding even more educational outreach in science.

Interested in participating in naming craters in Astronomers Without Borders Province? Go to Uwingu’s website and in the bottom left of the screen search  for “Astronomers Without Borders”. You’ll see the province in the center of the screen. Use the + and – on the left of the map to zoom in and see more craters. Drag to take a look around. Name your crater and it will also Astronomers Without Borders in its location description forever.

Why do I think this is such a cool idea?  I’m thinking about future generations on Mars, really. Compare them to the first generations of explorers that traveled across unknown lands and seas on Earth? They had to make up names as they went along, and for a time some places had more than one name.  The idea of naming things on Mars — a planet we can SEE in high resolution quite well — ahead of time is very engaging. Getting the public involved — the very people who will be paying for (and sending their relatives on) the mission, makes incredibly good sense.

Finally, presenting our explorers with a completed map literally gives them a gift from the people of Earth to take with them. It will contain our thoughts, our wishes, our hopes and our dreams encoded on it, even before they set foot on the planet. It’s one less thing for them to worry about, particularly in the first mission or two when simply gaining a foothold and surviving will be their number one tasks.

It’s not often we get to wave our brave explorers on to a new world; giving them a map with names that remind them of us left at home will be a powerful gift, too.

Why DO People Do Astronomy?

It’s Kept us Alive, For One Thing

Last year I wrote a book called Astronomy 101, (listed here at Amazon, but you can find it all over the place) at the request of a publisher that wanted to reach out to people about a topic they felt was interesting, but sometimes perceived as “hard” or “too scientific” for casual reading. The idea was that people would pick up the book, read a thousand words on a topic, and they’d have a good introduction to that topic. So, I took on the challenge, and it WAS a challenge. I’ve been doing, studying, and writing about astronomy nearly all my adult life, and before that I got interested as a kid. So, in a sense, I’ve been looking up at the stars ever since.

As I pondered how to open up the topic in the introduction, I thought back to a TV show that had a LOT of influence on me. It was called Cosmos: A Personal Journey.  It was strangely prescient, since that show launched my interested in sharing astronomy with audiences.  Today, I have written many articles and books and documentary scripts about astronomy, and, even cooler, there’s a new “Cosmos” out there, wowing the next generation of skygazers.

So, it seemed fitting last year (actually before I even knew about the “new” Cosmos) to invoke Carl Sagan, who helped set us on the road to cosmic exploration a few decades ago.  Here’s part of the introduction from my book, where I make the connection from the skies to our everyday lives:

The astronomer Carl Sagan once said that modern people are descendants of astronomers. Humans have always been skywatchers. Our earliest ancestors connected the motions of the Sun, Moon, and stars to the passage of time and the yearly change of seasons. Eventually, they learned to predict and chart celestial motions. They used that information to create timepieces and calendars. Accurate knowledge of the sky has always helped navigators find their way around, whether across an ocean or in deep space.

Humanity’s fascination with the sky may have begun with shepherds, farmers, and navigators using the sky for daily
needs, but today that interest has blossomed into a science. Professional astronomers use advanced technology and techniques to measure and chart objects and events very precisely. New discoveries come constantly, adding to a priceless treasury of knowledge about the universe and our place in it. In addition, the tools and technologies of astronomy and space exploration find their way into our technologies. If you fly in a plane, use a smartphone, have surgery, surf the Internet, shop for clothes, eat food, ride in a car, or any of the countless things you do each day, you use technology that in some way derived from astronomy and space science.

It would be really great if we could see a resurgence of interest in astronomy among more people. There are people who can bring the sky to you and bring YOU to an understanding of it. They work in planetariums and science centers. They’re teachers and professors. They belong to astronomy clubs and online discussion groups. Some are like me: we write books that we hope will share OUR love of the sky with you.

I’ve written before about how the universe is in our DNA, through the chemical elements created inside stars, for example. So, it makes a lot of sense that we are intimately connected to the universe, and that in our history, we finally learned to look back up at the stars, use them, and learn about them. Now it’s time to kick up our education to the next notch, to accept that connection and embrace the cosmos for the learning experience it is giving us.