{Radio telescopes on Earth will beam 90,000 messages to Mars on Friday to commemorate the launch 50 years ago of the first robotic probe to visit the planet.}<\/p>\n
A U.S. space funding company called Uwingu organized the extraterrestrial shout-out to mark the 50th anniversary of NASA\u2019s Mariner 4 mission and to raise funds for its other projects.<\/p>\n
Uwingu\u2019s \u201cBeam Me To Mars\u201d initiative invited interested participants to send digital radio-wave transmissions of their names, messages and pictures to Mars for fees ranging from $5 to $99.<\/p>\n
The effort attracted several celebrities including actor and comedian Seth Green and actor George Takei, who portrayed Mr. Sulu on the television series \u201cStar Trek.\u201d<\/p>\n
The transmission is scheduled to begin just after 3 p.m. EST\/2000 GMT on Friday. Traveling at the speed of light, the messages will take 15 minutes to reach Mars. The entire transmission will be repeated twice.<\/p>\n
While there is no one on Mars to answer the call, project organizers say that is beside the point.<\/p>\n
Copies of the messages will be delivered to Congress, to NASA headquarters in Washington, and the United Nations in New York as a show of support for space exploration.<\/p>\n
\u201cThough no one is on Mars yet to receive the messages, here on Earth people will hear them loud and clear,\u201d Uwingu wrote on the project website.<\/p>\n
Uwingu, pronounced \u201coo-wing-goo\u201d which means \u201csky\u201d in Swahili, is a privately owned company that raises money to fund space research and educational outreach projects.<\/p>\n
Since Mariner 4\u2019s successful flyby of Mars, returning the first pictures of the planet\u2019s surface, more than 20 other spacecraft have successfully visited, orbited or landed on the planet\u2019s surface.<\/p>\n
NASA currently has three orbiters and two rovers working on Mars, and the European Space Agency and India each have one Mars orbiter.<\/p>\n
The long-term goal of the U.S. space program is to land astronauts on the Red Planet.<\/p>\n
{{Reuters}}<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
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