Nasa has announced it will be sending three haikus to orbit Mars aboard a spacecraft due for launch in November.

The poetry will sit aboard the Mars Atmosphere and Volatile Evolution (Maven) spacecraft and forms part of the organisation's Going To Mars Campaign which operates out of the University of Colorado's Laboratory for Atmospheric and Space Physics (CU/LASP).

"This new campaign is a great opportunity to reach the next generation of explorers and excite them about science, technology, engineering and maths," said Bruce Jakosky, Maven's principal investigator at CU/LASP. "I look forward to sharing our science with the worldwide community as Maven begins to piece together what happened to the Red Planet's atmosphere."

For those interested in sending a set of syllables to hover over the Red Planet, the poetry contest is open to the public until 1 July and voting will begin on 15 July for the three best options. Or to put it another way:

Heading off to Mars
Voted for by the public
Raising awareness

Or something.

While in orbit Maven will explore the upper atmosphere of the planet. One of its main aims is to investigate how the the atmosphere is lost to space in the hopes of determining what happened to water on Mars' surface.


Latest on