To commemorate the 50th anniversary of the first robotic probe to visit Mars, radio telescopes on earth will beam as many as 90,000 messages on 28th November, 2014, Friday.
The space-funding company, Uwingu, has organized the event. It will send around 90,000 names, messages and pictures hurtling towards the red planet at the speed of light. The event is part of the company's 'Beam Me to Mars' project.
The project invited the public to send digital radio-wave transmissions of their names, messages and pictures to Mars. The fee for the same ranged from $5 to $99.
The event attracted many celebrities, including actor and comedian Seth Green and actor George Takei, former International Space Station commander Chris Hadfield, author Homer Hickam and former NASA Deputy Administrator Lori Garver and former TV "Science Guy" Bill Nye, among others
The transmission will start after 3 p.m. EST/2000 GMT on Friday. Authorities concerned affirmed that it will take 15 minutes for the messages to reach Mars. The messages transmitted by Universal Space Network will be travelling at the rate of one million bits per second .The event will be repeated twice. Copies of the messages will be sent to Congress, NASA headquarters in Washington and the United Nations in New York.
Uwingu wrote on the project website that there is no one to receive the message, but on earth, people will hear them loud and clear. On November 28, 1964, NASA launched the Mariner 4 spacecraft. After seven months, the spacecraft complete its historic flyby of the red planet and sent back the first close-up photos of another planet ever taken from deep space.
With the launch of the ill-fated Mariner 3 spacecraft, man's exploration of Mars started on November 5, 1964. After almost nine hours in flight, Mariner 4 was launched on November 28.
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