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 Vinci, Schiaparelli, Cassini, Flammarion, Huygens, and Halley. Other scientists are commemorated in nearby craters such as Curie, Rutherford, and Pasteur. This region on Mars also includes craters named after science fiction and entertainment greats Asimov, Orson 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.