BEHIND-THE-SCENES : [#128 ONE SMALL STEP]
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ROBERT PICARDO AND THE PLANETARY SOCIETY

The Planetary Society is a group that has wonderful educational programmes, and they asked me if I wanted to be on the Advisory Board because they knew that I had a certain access to an audience that was interested in science fiction. Perhaps I could encourage them to develop an interest in real science as well. So I gladly accepted. I've been on the Advisory Board for about five years.

I was quite active in a programme they have called Red Rover Goes To Mars, where kids would build little Rovers made out of Lego toys, and they would explore an imaginary Mars surface via the Internet. The Red Rover Goes to Mars project is made possible through a partnership with the LEGO Company, with special support from the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Visionary Products Inc., Plasmon OMS, Arizona State University, and Malin Space Science Systems.

full-scale model of the Mars Exploration Rover (MER) built out of about 90,000 LEGOŽ bricks; the model weighs 130 kilogrammes and took about 650 man-hours to build;
picture: click here for computer artwork of the Mars Exploration Rover by Dan Maas of Cornell University, 46Kb

names and Mars diaries of these and other Student Astronauts are at The Planetary Society: Red Rover Goes To Mars

These kids, who won this competition, got to go down to this facility in San Diego and sent actual commands to the Mars Global Surveyor, a spacecraft currently on a mission, and direct it to take photographs of the part of Mars that they picked for their soil samples, the winners.

Student Astronauts

above right: an ESA (Eurospean Space Agency) artist's conception of the Mars Express spacecraft at Mars with the antenna for MARSIS (Mars Advanced Radar for Subsurface and Ionospheric Sounding) extended

On 8th December 8 2003, Robert Picardo was part of "Marsapalooza", an event which brought students and the Mars Rover team together.

I'm here today at Universal Studios in front of the IMAX Theater. In a few minutes we'll be going in there and introducing the science and engineering team behind the Mars mission that will be sending two Rovers to land on Mars in the first week of 2004. So I'm delighted that I've been asked here to make the introductions and glad that you're here to see it.

Next page: Robert Picardo and the Planetary Society, continued

Apart from ST DVD screenshots, this page includes pictures/artwork from my collection, gathered from a variety of sources.