This Post is by:
Rachel Nishimura and Dr. Bruce Cordell

Waiting patiently until 2015 for the next Maslow Window — a twice-per-century golden age of prosperity, exploration, and technology featuring unprecedented human expansion into the cosmos — is not as easy as it sounds. In fact, last September in an exciting example of “early ebullience,” two MIT students created their own exploration event in the direction of space itself (Wired, 9/15/09)

Is Mars already becoming the “People’s Planet”? Click

Using just a weather balloon, styrofoam beer cooler, cheap Canon A470 compact camera,
instant hand warmers, and a GPS cellphone — all for less than $150 — Justin Lee and Oliver Yeh built a space camera that took photos of the Earth’s surface from 93,000 feet! An 8-GB memory card stored images during the 5-hour flight until the rig was recovered following its 40 minute fall to Earth.

Grassroots projects — if you can call the stratosphere “grassroots” — like Lee’s and Yeh’s, all the way up to major sponsored competitions like Google’s Lunar Prize, suggest we’re rapidly approaching an Apollo era zeitgeist.

If you want to join the ebullient fun and build your own space camera, get instructions from Lee and Yeh here.

More recently, even Mars is becoming “the people’s planet!”

Since January, NASA has encouraged Earthlings who want to see even farther than Lee and Yeh, to tell them where to point the most powerful camera on NASA’s Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter. And the first 8 “People’s Choice” awards on Mars are visible HERE.

“NASA’s Mars program is a prime example of what we call participatory exploration,” NASA Administrator Charlie Bolden said. “To allow the public to aim a camera at a specific site on a distant world is an invaluable teaching tool that can help educate and inspire our youth to pursue careers in science, technology, engineering and math.”

“Some people get into model railroading or Civil War re-enactments. My thing is exploring Mars,” said James Secosky, a retired teacher in Manchester, N.Y., who suggested an area for imaging after he examined online images from other Mars-orbiting cameras.

Remember, the best part of any exotic vacation is the pictures. And if you want to help NASA decide which part of the unimaged 99% of Mars to create memories of next, be sure to visit HERE.

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