Our Name Is Going All The Way To Mars

Since Mangalyaan’s successful placement in the orbit of Mars, me and Little B are exploring everything space – spacecrafts, satellites, solar system and anything that moves and goes up in the sky. How much does she really understands the concepts, well, I simply do not know. But I know that she wants more. She wants to make more play dough earth models, she wants to find more pictures of Mars in  the newspaper and she wants to count more and more stars.

Sometimes I get amazed at her imagination. She will hear a thing from me, add to it another thing from her own experience and create something entirely new. For example, we were playing around on NASA’s website with their Explore Mars feature. It is like a video game for kids, they can steer a robotic rover on Mars. There were a couple of craters on the surface of ‘animated’ Mars. Little B comes up with the story – “rover should stay away from these holes or it is going to fall inside them and then its body will be found in a lake far away.” (Reference being a recent incident in Bangalore where a girl fell in a storm water drain and her body was washed away and later found kms away in a lake.)

Seriously, only a child can think like that!

Another thing happened. I and Little B are just so so so very lucky for Pluto. How?

We were drawing solar system. I drew 9 concentric circles or orbits supposedly for 9 planets. I soon remembered that Pluto has been demoted and isn’t a planet anymore. So I erased one circle which irritated Little B. And hence we had a long talk about how once Pluto was a planet but isn’t anymore. Little B just couldn’t understand “why people don’t want Pluto to be with them.” She felt sorry for the lonesome planet!

The very next day, I read that Pluto might get an upgrade and become a planet again. Hurray for Pluto!

After such eventful and space-filled couple of weeks, how cool it is that today we found out that we can send our names to Mars. It isn’t anything like going to Mars ourselves, but still has a kick to it. NASA is inviting space enthusiasts to send name to Mars. All you have to do is to just fill a form. This is how your name will be send.

Interested? Hurry up, the last day is October 31.