Most people will bury a time capsule, but a group of brilliant young minds will surely find something more exciting to do with it, like sending it off to Mars. That’s exactly what a team of students from MIT, Duke University, Stanford University, and the University of Connecticut plan to do. They’re encoding a digital time capsule with audio clips, videos, photos and messages to send to the red planet on a Cubesat-based spacecraft. But, that’s just a small part of what they’re trying to accomplish: they’re also using the opportunity to try out a number of new technologies for space travel. After all, in the words of mission director Emily Briere, the project aims “to remind people we go to space to push forward humanity.”
Students at MIT and other universities are building a time capsule that they hope will soon contain messages, photos, audio clips, and videos gathered by tens of millions of people across the world. But this won’t be just any other time capsule, because this one is destined for Mars. The digital time capsule — appropriately named “Time Capsule for Mars” — is the first crowdfunded, student-led space mission. According to The Boston Globe, it will be sent to the red planet via three 27-pound satellites, named Cubesats. The project will also test several new and relatively inexpensive technologies that researchers hope will advance current Mars exploration capabilities. Emily Briere, the project’s mission director and a student at Duke University, told The Boston Globe that the students “wanted to remind people we go to space to push forward humanity.” The capsule, which is expected to cost about $25 million, will launch in 2017. But a lot of the technologies that the students plan to use haven’t been tested yet, so that target date might take a hit. “The actual propulsion, the communication, and health of the spacecraft are the biggest concerns,” said Paulo Lozano, director of the Space Propulsion Laboratory at MIT. But for Lozano, the project is about more than just getting to Mars. “These endeavors require a high technical skill, and it’s very important for young people to be a part of that.”
