A young man from Poland has been chosen as one of sixteen Student Astronauts to work with the Mars Exploration Rover team at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) in Pasadena, California, this month.
Maciej Hermanowicz of Dywity is among the eight boys and eight girls, aged 13 to 17, who won their places on the team through an essay contest run by the Planetary Society, a non-profit space advocacy group that works with NASA.
The Student Astronauts are part of The Planetary Society's "Red Rover Goes to Mars" project, run in partnership with the LEGO Company. The project is an official part of NASA's Mars Exploration Rover mission.
"We set out looking for the 'right stuff' and we got it," said Bruce Betts, The Planetary Society's Director of Projects. "The sixteen extraordinary kids who will be interacting with the Mars Exploration Rover mission team represent, and will communicate with, a whole world of young space enthusiasts."
Maciej Hermanowicz will work on the mission from January 30 to February 8. Maciej’s younger brother Daniel was one of the "Red Rover Goes to Mars" Student Navigators who operated a prototype planetary rover at JPL in 2002.
According to Maciej, "Exploring the unknown is a wonderful adventure and a huge new experience, and I simply cannot wait to taste it."
Student Astronauts will work with the scientists and engineers overseeing the science payload on the Mars Exploration Rovers, including the panoramic cameras and the magnets, and will analyze new data returned from the rovers. The Student Astronauts will rotate through JPL in teams of two, with each pair spending approximately one week at the facility.
The Mission
For a few months of the mission, the students will participate every Martian day in examining pictures from the rovers and attending team meetings with scientists and engineers, grappling with choices about what orders to send the rovers. The Student Astronauts will also serve as ambassadors to the world at large, communicating over the Internet and through other media about life inside a Mars mission team.
This is the first time that an international group of students selected through an open competition will be able to participate in an active planetary spacecraft mission. It complements NASA student programs that encourage the next generation of explorers to pursue science, technology, engineering, and math interests by promoting the spirit of international cooperation in discovery.
The individual interests of the Student Astronauts are as diverse as their backgrounds, ranging from fencing to soccer and theater to violin. However, they all share a common bond in their fascination with space exploration and commitment to high achievement.
The winning students hail from twelve nations spread across five continents: Brazil, Canada, Hungary, India, Poland, Singapore, South Africa, Spain, Sri Lanka, Taiwan, the United Kingdom, and the United States.
Text and photos courtesy of The Planetary Society
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