Mars festival a soaring success
MARS — Martians and space fans of all ages filled downtown Friday and Saturday for the fourth biannual Mars Exploration Celebration.
The festival was run by the Mars New Year Committee. In the past, it was referred to as Mars New Year.
The event celebrates the New Year on the planet Mars, which occurs every 687 days, or roughly two years.
Rain interrupted the day Saturday, but events still were able to proceed afterward.
“Thank you to all of the volunteers and people who helped put this together,” said Mayor Gregg Hartung. “Despite the rain, and despite some of the technical problems, this is a great event.”
Saturday's portion of the event saw visitors getting the chance to interact with NASA scientists through remote video call presentations as well as listening to larger speeches on the main stage.NASA originally had planned to send representatives in person, but opted to go remote because of COVID concerns.Gary Jordan, public affairs officer with NASA's Johnson Space Center in Houston, gave a presentation on “The Path to Boots on Mars.” Jordan grew up in Butler County and attended Seneca Valley School District in his youth.“In the space industry, you need to look at everything. It's not just the scientists and engineers,” Jordan said. “(As a public affairs officer,) my job is to tell everybody about what we are doing.”Jordan explained that before NASA will be able to send humans to space or to Mars, scientists will need to research more about how living in microgravity would affect the human body.“The more data we have, the more we can understand what is happening and the better we can come up with countermeasures,” he said.“Getting to Mars is tremendously complex,” said Dr. Jose Antonio Rodriguez-Manfredi, of the Mars Environmental Dynamics Analyzer program, calling in from Spain for a remote presentation about predicting weather on Mars.“Landing on Mars is even more (complex). Martian weather changes hour by hour,” he said. “It is always changing.”NASA astrobiologist Dr. Lindsay Hays gave a talk on the search for life on Mars. She explained that astrobiology brings together two different fields of science — knowledge of earth's organisms and knowledge of space environments — to answer big questions about how life might survive in space.“The search for life is really a search for habitats,” Hays said. “3.5 billion years ago, Mars may have been wet, and the question is what happened to Mars as its climate changed, was it ever possible to have liquid water on Mars, and what did those habitats look like?”
Activities throughout the day included an alien costume contest, a science show from Ralph Crewe of YouTube channel “Isn't That Something” and remote science comedy presentations from Helen Arney and Steve Mould of British science comedy group Festival of the Spoken Nerd.Anakin Petroski, 4, won in the under-12 group for the costume competition, Zach Petroski, 14, won in the 12 to 18 group, Adam Snow won in the adults group, and Annie Koch won the overall audience choice award.
The Mars Robotics Association hosted a “Robotic Village” tent with seven other robotics teams from across the region. Teams demonstrated their robots to complete challenges such as playing soccer or launching a ball through an obstacle.“This event is fantastic. It's a great way of getting STEM (science, technology, engineering and math) to kids,” said Paul Kritschgau, a mentor for Mountaineer Area Robotics from Morgantown, W.Va., who attended the Robotic Village. “It's also a great chance for them to meet kids from other states.”Mars Robotics Association students sold bottles of student-designed Red Planet Soda and hosted demonstrations.“Our goal with these events is to spread STEM as far as possible, and also to recruit members. A lot of our teammates have come from events like this,” said Luke Kastner, a junior at Pine-Richland High School who is part of the Mars Robotics Association.“There haven't been many events this year, because all competitions were moved to virtual,” he said. “This is our first big event since COVID.”
Representatives from the Aldrin Family Foundation involved visitors in demonstrations, driving robots on a gigantic ground map of the surface of Mars. The map, along with a similar map of the moon, will later be sent to the Mars Area School District for use in STEM education programs.Jim Christensen of the Aldrin Family Foundation said that the maps can help make space feel real to young people.“We take what looks like a grain of red sand in the sky, and we give it place names and you can walk around on it,” he said. “Kids walk around on it, and they start to see fun stuff.”He said that different educators find different uses for the maps in their lessons: teaching latitude and longitude, space science, and even creative writing.“We'll sit down with teachers and ask, what do you see doing with this (map)?” he said. “It's a matter of what you would use it for.”
The winners of the Mars STEAM Challenge, a science competition for youths in grades 3 to 8 that asks students to come up with possible solutions for life in a future Mars colony, were unveiled at the festival.“In the past we've done this as a traditional science fair. But with COVID and all the technology available, we created a virtual project for them to do,” said Mars STEAM Challenge head Karrie Snider.Carl Wolfe won first place for the grades 3 to 4 group.The grades 5 to 6 group winner was Sage Mahan, and the grades 7 to 8 winner was Cassie Busler.
