Coffee Klatch

I remember seeing this guy on TV back when I was a kid. Did you ever think it was possible to make a Bubble CUBE? Watch this!

Back in October I blogged about flying your name to Mars. Well, I just got an email last night saying that the silica glass mini-DVD has been mounted in the Phoenix spacecraft, which has just been flown to Cape Canaveral, where it will begin final testing and preparation for launch.

Besides collecting names for the disc, they’ve also got “Visions of Mars” on there, which is a collection of art and literature written about the planet Mars.

The names and Visions of Mars were written to the silica mini-DVD by the company Plasmon OMS using a special technique. The resulting archival disk should last at least hundreds of years on the Martian surface, ready to be picked up by future explorers.

After the disc was written, a special label was applied to the disc to identify it for future explorers. Then, the whole assembly was “baked out” (to kill microbes and also to reduce future outgassing of the materials), and Lockheed Martin in Colorado installed it onto the spacecraft.

So you could say that this disc represents the first library on Mars! That’s VERY cool!

And my name’s on the disc! DOUBLY cool!