Mission patch for the crew 118 was revealed today
"He tini nga whetu e ngaro I te kapua iti
Many stars cannot be concealed by a small cloud!"
Whakatauki gifted by Bruce Ngataierua, our Maori Crew member
To me this whakatauki signifies our strive to become a spacefaring civilization. The stars are there waiting for us, no matter how many clouds we will be seeing onto the skies.
Thank you Bruce!
Also today was a very good day as our mission patch was finalized. According to NASA, for every space flight, the astronaut crew designs their own mission patch. Included in the patch design are various elements describing the different phases of that particular mission. Usually, in the design includes the names of the crew, the name of the space vehicle and its mission number. We are the 118th crew to go to the Mars Desert Research Station, in the last 10 years since the station was activated.
With this occasion we prepared a resource sheet about Mission Patches, for you to use in school in the hope that you will be designing your own mission patch whilst you will be interacting with us on Mars.
Make sure you check this page
on our site for accessing all the resources we prepared for you. They are under construction for now and hope to have them all finalised by the time we are "Off to Mars".
Since our mission is called 'KiwiMars' we believed it was only logical to adopt as symbol the most loved bird of New Zealand. Then use the colour kiwi-green (another symbol of our country) to mark the boundaries of the kiwi and we also incorporated a koru in the design.
The Koru is a Maori symbol that stands for New Life, Growth, Strength and Peace. The circular shape of the koru conveys the idea of perpetual movement while the inner coil suggests a return to the point of origin.
New Life, Growth, Strength and Peace are our wishes as we are setting sail to learn about life, seed life on Mars and discover the strength of the many. It takes a planet to terraform another planet and we hope to play an tiny part in the great scheme of things.
Explore this site
Commander's Log
The commander of the expedition will keep you posted with the latest progress in the preparation of the project.