BATON ROUGE, La. — A 14-year-old being groomed by NASA to be among the first humans to set foot on the planet Mars will attend the Mars New Year.

“The good thing is with her going to Mars, Pa., she can say she's already been to Mars,” joked Alyssa Carson's father, Bert Carson, “so I can stop doing all this.”

The Mars New Year celebration will be June 19 and 20 in downtown Mars.

The Carsons will drive their home-decorated “Space RV” — a used camper Carson bought to take Alyssa to Canada — to the Mars New Year and stay the weekend.

Alyssa will give speeches and participate in some of the NASA activities there. Alyssa Carson's father said his daughter at age 3 saw a child's TV show with a mission to Mars theme. She asked her father if anyone had ever been to the planet, and he explained that while man had gone to the moon, no human foot had ever touched the surface of Mars.

“A couple weeks later she said 'Daddy, I want to be the first person to go to Mars' and I said 'Sure, baby. Uh-huh.'”

The single father quickly learned the pronouncement had not been a cute and implausible toddler statement. Now the teen is on a course to achieve her dreams in 2033 at age 32.

Carson said after her statement, Alyssa continued to talk about Mars. He caught her at age 6 in her room studying a map of the Red Planet. She told her father she was concerned about the potential for the Mars landing vehicle to bounce when it landed.

“She said it's going to bounce off course, and I'm going to need to know where we are,” Carson said. “That's why she was studying the map.”

At age 7, the Carsons saw a sign announcing a space camp offered by the U.S. Space and Rocket Center, which is connected to NASA. Bert and Alyssa Carson attended the parent/child version of the camp over a long weekend and participated in the simulators and other activities.

“To her, it was like going to Disney World,” Carson said. “She got really hooked and was going crazy about it.”

Alyssa was awarded the “Right Stuff Award” at that first space camp, which is given to a single camper who has the most potential to go to Mars.

“They were all fascinated with this little kid who spoke four languages,” Carson said of his daughter, who attends a private international school in Baton Rouge.

Alyssa did attend another NASA space camp, and this time NASA officials were there to meet her. She also was allowed to attend the regular space camp while underage, and was invited to Cape Canaveral to watch shuttle launches.

She has done two US Space and Rocket Center camps per year since then.

“She has become the mascot of the U.S. Space and Rocket Center,” Carson said.

In addition to 12 space camps, Alyssa also has completed the center's space challenge, space academy, aviation challenge and robotics academy, her father said.

She also was the first to complete all three NASA space camps, which are in the United States, Turkey and Canada. Another first came in June 2013 when Alyssa got all her stamps in the NASA Passport Program, which challenged campers to travel to all 14 NASA Visitor Centers in the U.S. to participate in various space-related activities.

The single father said after taking his daughter to all the camps and activities all over the country and Europe, he felt the need to meet with NASA officials.

“We went to meet with (the NASA officials in charge of the Mars exploration project) to say 'Is the Mars mission really going to happen? Is this real?'” Carson said.

He said the officials like Alyssa's ability to speak four languages, all her “firsts” accomplishments, and her singular commitment to her goal of being one of the first astronauts to land on Mars.

“Because of all this, we were invited to Washington, D.C., in January 2014 to sit on a panel to discuss trips to Mars in 2030,” Carson said. “The panel was three Ph.ds, an astronaut, and my 12-year-old. I freaked out daily.”

Carson, who is not in the space business and just a regular father, said his daughter's post high school career has already been mapped out. Alyssa will get her bachelor's degree from Cambridge University in England, her master's degree at the International Space University in France and her doctorate in astrobiology at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

“The more you know about Alyssa, the more you know it's her destiny,” Carson said of the Mars trip. “All the stars are lining up.”