‘Fellow Martians’ to meet in Bangalore today
62 Indians among the 1,058 aspirants shortlisted worldwide for one-way voyage.
By : b. r. srikanth
Update: 2014-01-25 11:06 GMT
Bangalore: “Fellow Martians” to meet in Bengaluru? Well, this is not a do of little green men from Mars, but of 62 Indians among 1,058 aspirants worldwide short-listed by Mars One - a crowd-funded project of a Dutch non-profit organization to send 24 to 40 people on a one-way voyage to Mars to build a permanent settlement on the red planet.
They will gather here at the “Million Martian Meeting” on Saturday to get to known their co-passengers, and about what motivated them to respond to the most daring call in history to volunteer to be the first inhabitants of that planet.
And, though there are four more rounds of physical and psychological evaluation for these astronaut-aspirants, some like Sandeep Kumar Laik, an automation test engineer in a multi-national company in Bengaluru and Amulya Nidhi Rastogi, a student of mechanical engineering student from Gurgaon, are getting ready with a list of things they would like to carry with them to Mars.
“As a console gaming freak, I wish I could carry my console (PS3) there along with my favourite songs or movies and PDF copy of the books I like to read,” says Sandeep. And Amulya’s baggage would include gifts from his parents, girlfriend and friends though he has not started packing his bag yet.
Though Amulya and Vinod Kotiya, a project manager at NTPC Ltd, New Delhi, and father of an 18 month-old baby girl, who has also made the first cut, are concerned about the hazards involved—a 6-8 month journey through space, high levels of cosmic radiation and dust storms on Mars, they are confident that they would be able to overcome them.
“Personally, I think the Mars mission will set a good example for others to follow. It will motivate other agencies to come forward for deep space exploration whether it will fail or succeed,” Vinod Kotiya told Deccan Chronicle.
Apart from exchanging notes at the day-long meeting, these astronaut-aspirants would get an opportunity to interact with Dr. Robert Zubrin, President of The Mars Society, USA, eminent engineer Dr. Wooday P Krishna, Mr. Bas Lansdorp, CEO of Mars One, Mr. Arno Wielders, founder of Mars One, Mr. Stephen M Bassett, Executive Director of Paradigm Research Group and the Extraterrestrial Phenomena Political Action Committee (X-PPAC), and Indian space scientists Dr. Mylswamy Annadurai, Dr. R. M. Vasagam, and Mr. K.R. Sridhara Murthi.
After the meeting all the astronaut-aspirants plan to hit the gym and get ready for the next round of evaluation in March 2014. Once the project takes off, plans are afoot to make the entire process a 24x7 reality show. The actual flights with the manned crew are scheduled to start in 2023.