Thursday 4 September 2014

The global university competition for a payload on the 2018 Mars lander, and Mars One's request for its popularization.

As described in my last post, Mars One aims to launch a lander in 2018, that will land on Mars in 2019 and operate there for up to 1 Earth year (i.e. till 2020). It will be based on the successful 2007 NASA Phoenix lander, and its prime contractor will be Lockheed Martin. It will have 8 payloads, some of which aim to demonstrate certain key technologies necessary for a permanent human settlement on Mars. The total payload mass of 44 kg will be allocated as follows:
1. Water extraction (10 kg)
2. Soil acquisition (15 kg) 
3. Thin film solar power demonstrator (6 kg)
4. Camera system (5 kg)
5. Open for random proposals from the highest bidder (2 kg)
6. Open for random proposals from the highest bidder (2 kg)
7. Educational payload (2 kg)
8. Winning university experiment (2 kg)

The last payload will be designed and developed by the winning team of a global university competition.

On 23 July 2014, Mars One sent an email to all its astronaut candidates, part of which is shown below:


I had checked the Mars One community website (community.mars-one.com), where the competition entries were displayed. Till end-July 2014, there were less than 20 entries in this competition, which was kind of disappointing, as it was a global competition for a payload on something that would land on Mars. Any competition like this should easily attract more than 50 entries from all over the world. Of course, Mars One has its share of skeptics, who think the whole idea of a private not-for-profit organization aiming to send humans on one-way trips to Mars, is laughable. Many would consider even this 2018 lander mission as almost impossible, as it would require funds of more than a hundred US dollars, which Mars One is yet to secure. But maybe the reason for low participation in this competition was lack of advertising.

In beginning August 2014, I went to the web-page for registration in this competition. They had not mentioned the application deadline anywhere, so I emailed Mars One, inquiring about the application deadline, and also whether they could send me some posters in hard-copy (or soft-copy which I could print) that I could send to universities in India. They replied, saying that the application deadline is 31st August 2014, and though they did not have any posters, there was a lot of information in the "Request for Proposals" and the "Proposal Information Package", whose links they had provided in the email.

31 August was quite near, so if I had to advertise this competition, I had to do it soon. I thought of designing and printing the posters myself, and then sending them by speed-post to reputed Indian universities for engineering and science (e.g. Indian Institutes of Technology, Indian Institutes of Science, National Institutes of Technology, etc.). But when I calculated the total cost of doing all this, it proved to be too much. Even if I printed the posters on ordinary A4 size paper (instead of professional poster printing on large size, as I was thinking earlier), and sent the copies to around 50 universities, the total cost would be more than Rs 2,500. That was kind of beyond my budget for this purpose. I thought of reducing the number of universities to around 10, but what would be the result in sending posters to so few universities? Finally, I decided that there was no need to actually print the posters and send those hard-copies to universities by post. It would be much quicker (and have zero cost) if I just emailed a PDF file of the poster to the universities, and requested them to take its print-out and put it up on their notice boards.

The poster I designed is shown in the image below:


In the beginning, I emailed this poster to the director of institute and head of each department in the Indian Institute of Science and the 7 old Indian Institutes of Technology (the top 8 universities in the country). But that took too much time, and I had to ensure that the emails reached all universities latest by mid-August. So for the other universities, I sent the email only to the institute directors. In all, I emailed the following 54 Indian universities:
  1. Indian Institute of Science.
  2. Indian Institutes of Technology (16 in no).
  3. National Institutes of Technology (30 in no).
  4. Indian Institutes of Science Education and Research (5 in no).
  5. National Institute of Science Education and Research.
  6. Indian Institute of Space Science and Technology
I also got a print-out of the poster put up on the notice board of my college (Rizvi College of Engineering, affiliated to the University of Mumbai).

In addition, I also emailed the following 3 foreign reputed universities:
  1. Massachusetts Institute of Technology
  2. California Institute of Technology
  3. University of Oxford
I wish I could email more universities, but there was not enough time. Any way, 58 universities and colleges seemed a decent enough number. If my poster inspired even a single person to participate in this competition, my effort and time invested in this task would not go to waste.

After the application deadline of 31 August 2014 passed, I saw that there were 3 entries (out of a total of 35) from the above universities! The participants and universities are listed below:
  1. Chandrakant Kaushal, from the Indian Institute of Space Science and Technology.
  2. Biplob Kumar Nandy, from the Indian Institute of Science Education and Research, Mohali.
  3. Kartikay Tehlan, from the Indian Institute of Technology, Kanpur.
Of course, there is no way to be sure that the above 3 participants got to know about this competition from my poster... they may have got the information from some other source. But it is very much possible that they got the info from my poster which was printed and put up on the notice boards in their institutes.

Success!!
:)

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