You and your college gang make a WhatsApp group every alternate month with the intention of planning a trip to Goa. You pass your college, get a job, make another group with colleagues, get married, have kids, but your Goa trip is still in progress. However, you should have be-friended those 1.3 lakh Indians who have just booked their tickets to planet Mars.
Around 1,38,899, people from India have ‘booked’ a flight to the Red Planet via Nasa’s InSight (Interior Exploration using Seismic Investigations, Geodesy and Heat Transport) mission slated for launch on May 5, 2018. Nasa states that those who submitted their names were provided online ‘boarding passes’ for the mission.
The total number of names received by Nasa from all over the world is 2,429,807. According to Nasa, India stands on 3rd position in terms of the total number of names submitted for the Mars mission.
The US is at Rank 1 with 6,76,773 names followed by China with 2,62,752 names. Andrew Good of Nasa’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) told TOI that the deadline to submit names was last week and “we are no longer accepting submissions”.
It will be a 720-day mission which will gather data on the Martian interior by monitoring Marsquakes.
Slated for landing near the Mars equator on November 26, 2018, NASA aims to study mars and to get a broader insight into the formation of rocky planets in the entire solar system.
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