Q&A: How a College Student Will Send a Time Capsule to Mars
Small cubes piggybacking on planned missions would carry millions of digital messages to the red planet.
Reflecting the proposed project's focus on Earth's younger generation, the Time Capsule to Mars mission will consist of digital messages, photos, videos, and audio files contributed by people around the world.
The mission was dreamed up by 20-year-old Emily Briere, a junior at Duke University in Durham, N.C. Her plan takes advantage of the burgeoning field of "CubeSats"—science payloads the size of two cereal boxes that can sometimes piggyback on a major mission launch and get a free ride into space. The roughly $25 million necessary for funding the project will come from what could be the world's largest ever crowdsourcing effort.
Already a year in the making, the project is actively supported by NASA and some of
