Student Space Ambassador Works to Send Kids to Space Camp

Interested in joining being part of #GiveToMarsDay? You’ve come to the right place!

Here are a few easy ways that you can participate:

1. Donate. Even a $10 donation will make a difference, so skip your morning Starbucks and help The Mars Generation achieving its fundraising goal.

2. Share! Share! Share! Spread the word about #GivetoMarsDay on your social media accounts as often as you can throughout the day. Here’s a sample of tweets you could use:

Help @AstronautAbby and her pals get home from #Mars! Help raise $100K in 24 hours for #STEMeducation www.givemn.org/organization/themarsgeneration #GTMD15

Potato power isn’t enough to get @AstronautAbby home from #Mars! See how you can help! www.givemn.org/organization/themarsgeneration #TheMartian #GTMD15

Each generous donation is an investment in our future. Donate by 11:59pm CST and help inspire youth! www.givemn.org/organization/themarsgeneration #GTMD15 #STEM

Give just $10 now to #TheMarsGeneration and help change the world! #GiveToMarsDay www.givemn.org/organization/themarsgeneration #GTMD15 #JourneyToMars #STEM

$10 can do so much more than you think. Contribute to our future. Be part of the change. http://www.givemn.org/organization/themarsgeneration #GTMD15 #STEM

3. Email Your Family and Friends. Ask your friends and family to help The Mars Generation reach its $100k fundraising goal. To make it easier for you, we’ve come up with a quick message that you can copy & paste:

Give To Mars Day – November 12 – Please Join ME!

Hi Name,

The Mars Generation (TMG) has planned a special 24-hour online fundraising campaign called Give to Mars Day planned for Give to the Max Day (Online community giving day hosted in MN with donors worldwide) on Today – November 12!

For the #GiveToMarsDay campaign, TMG has set out to raise $100,000 to help fund development of their 3 core programs, which include STEM and space outreach program, Student Space Ambassador program and Space Camp Scholarship Program.

I would like to ask you to consider joining me in contributing to the campaign today at http://www.givemn.org/organization/themarsgeneration you can contribute through 11:59pm CST – hurry before it’s too late!

Thank you,
Name
P.S. Here is a guide on ways you can help spread the word: http://themarsgeneration.org/give-to-mars-day-november-12-how-you-can-help/

 

4. Support The #PotatoChallenge Participants! They are planning to survive the way Mark Watney did in The Martian. That means living on only water and potatoes for the duration of the challenge. But they can earn “perks” every time we reach a new goal in the amount of money raised. That’s where you can help– Every time you tweet about the challenge, share participant’s tweets, or post updates on Facebook and Instagram, it will help spread the word and bring in donations and that will get them their “perks.” Make sure you use the hashtages #GivetoMarsDay, #gtmd2015, and #PotatoChallenge, and add the link to donate: http://www.givemn.org/organization/themarsgeneration

The TMG Potato Challenge is a fun collective activity that is designed to see if you have the right stuff to be a Martian for 24 hours! If you take the challenge you will be “stranded” on Mars for 24 hours just like fictional astronaut Mark Watney from The Martian movie. The good news is that being stranded does not take you out of your day-to-day life; it just means you have to live on potatoes and water (and maybe a few extra “earned” perks) for 24 hours.

The Challenge is set to run for 24 hours on November 12 from midnight 12:00am CST to 11:59pm CST (please check your time zone to ensure you are participating during the official challenge). Our collective cause is to raise funds for The Mars Generation as part of a big online giving day called Give to the Max Day – we have renamed it Give to Mars Day (because why not, right?).

How To Participate

To participate, it is pretty simple. All you need is some potatoes and water! Read the Guidelines here and sign up here. Be sure to add groundsupport@TheMarsGeneration.org to your email address book to ensure you get our emails (we will only send emails pertaining to Give to Mars Day).

You will want to sign up so you can be an official challenge participant and have a chance to win fun TMG prizes. We have some cool prizes including: TMG Launch Support T-Shirts, Mars or Bust 2030 T-Shirts and coffee, Astronaut Abby Patches and Signed Photos, some fun children’s space books and more! One winner will be chosen every hour during the 24-hour challenge. To learn how to win prizes go to our Potato Challenge Guideline Page or scroll to bottom of this page.

You are challenging yourself to make it a full day following the guidelines of the Give to Mars Day Martian Potato Challenge – but you are also working with our entire community as thousands of The Mars Generation supporters will be joining you! Do you think you have the right stuff? Sign up now! How about your co-workers, family and friends, do they have the right stuff? Challenge them to join in the fun too! The more people who participate the more fun it will be.

How To Win

To “win”, we all need to be “rescued” from Mars and returned to earth. How does this happen? When The Mars Generation reaches its online fundraising goal the rescue team will arrive and take us “home” to earth. And as a prize we all get to have a great big earth prepared meal, without potatoes!

To win for yourself, will require will power and for you to see if you have “the right stuff”. But don’t worry – if you need to break the rules no one will be watching you and this is for fun and charity!

We have lots of prizes to give away.

Every hour we will select one winner to receive a prize (that’s 24 winners)!

You may earn up to 8 entries per hour.

To enter you must be on Twitter and use the #PotatoChallenge hashtag. You will get one entry for every tweet that shows a photo of you participating in the Potato Challenge or has you participating (example: we ask you to share the music you are listening to, so you share a link to a YouTube video –that counts).

You are also entered in the drawings for every tweet that has a call to action to contribute or check out our Give To Mars Day campaign and also has the link to our campaign page. (limit 4 tweets per hour).

Examples include:

I am participating in the #GTMD15 #PotatoChallenge – Donate now and support @TheMarsGen #JourneyToMars https://givemn.org/organization/themarsgeneration

Help me get salt for my potatoes and save me from #Mars! #PotatoChallenge #TheMartian #GTMD15 https://givemn.org/organization/themarsgeneration

It’s for the kids #GTMD15. Support #STEM #PotatoChallenge #JourneyToMars https://givemn.org/organization/themarsgeneration

What will the money be used for?

This funding will go to help build out TMG’s 3 programs and assure that we have a strong start to 2016. We have over 150 Student Space Ambassadors signed up, our Future of Space group is 2000+ strong and we are on track to give away 10 scholarships to Space Camp in 2015 and hopefully with your help many more in 2016. You are helping to grow this organization and empower young people and adults to change the world.

To learn the rules of the challenge click here. To sign up click here. We look forward to you joining us! Thank you!

We are having some fun here at The Mars Generation, thanks to our sponsor Grand Ciel design! We are creating movie posts for The Mars Generation community members! As you can see from our images on this post the posters are modeled after The Martian movie poster “Bring Him Home” but instead of asking to “Bring Him Home” we are asking to “Bring Us There.”

Our #BringToMars campaign will run through November 12, 2015.

What is the significance of November 12?

You will have to wait to find out! We will make an announcement in the first week of November. Make sure you get the news by signing up for our email updates here.

To get your #BringToMars Martian movie poster made please submit a photo on our Facebook wall following the guidelines below:

• A headshot (shoulders/face – closer is better – Do NOT post a full body photo. Do NOT post a photo with more than one person in it.).
• Make sure the image is approximately 1000 pixels x 500 pixels in size
• Submit the name you would like to appear on the photo. The name needs to be 7 characters or less to work
• Anyone of any age can participate! If you are under the age of 13 please have your parents submit the photo for you.

 

 

Note: By submitting a photo Facebook Page or any other public social media channel you are giving us permission to share your #BringToMars photo online, through email or any other place we decide to use the photo.

 

In the coming months, youth all across America will be queuing up to go see the latest installments of The Hunger Games and the Divergent series. They will likely get into the new Walking Dead spinoff, and may be waiting for the third season of The 100 to begin. We live on a steady diet of post apocalyptic stories, especially our younger generation. It’s not all that surprising. These stories resonate with us because there is a general sense of loss of power and voice that so many of us feel. The future is filled with melting ice caps, foreign crises that are creeping ever closer toward home, and an establishment that doesn’t seem to care about us. There is a reason why the opening scene to Aaron Sorkin’s The Newsroom went viral in 2012 when Jeff Daniels’s character declares that America is not the greatest country in the world anymore. We all can feel that to varying degrees – especially our youth. After all, it’s their future.

But what if they could see something better?

The Martian premiered this weekend. It’s a story set in our near future where NASA is sending human missions to Mars. It follows Astronaut Mark Watney who, after a storm and freak accident, is stranded on the Red Planet. He must get back in contact with earth and figure out how to survive 140 million miles from home. It is quite entertaining, but it’s also much more than that. It is inspiring. Not simply in the obvious way of how humanity can come together to care about the life of one man, but also the refreshing future it presents its viewers; humanity can care about itself.

There are two large implications of this story:

One is that the United States, and many other world powers, have a renewed passion about NASA’s space program. Watney’s team is the third human mission, and there are plans for more. In this future, we have become willing to invest in human space exploration again. While the movie doesn’t go into this too much, I feel the need to point out that these decisions would bring with it a better economy and important scientific advancements. Space travel is wonderful and epic, but sometimes I think it’s easy for us to forget that with it come important changes that affect those back on earth. It’s not just something we spend money on because it’s cool, and apparently the people in this imagined future have seen that.

The second implication is this future is for everyone. While I wouldn’t say its representation is perfect, it’s very good. Long past are the days we saw in Apollo 13, where it seemed everyone running the show was a white male. Not here. Perhaps there is a hispanic teen who had been feeling increasingly frustrated with being treated like he will never amount to anything, but then he’ll see this movie. He’ll see Rick Martinez, a successful pilot and engineer with a young family back home, coincidentally born right around the same time as him. Maybe a girl who is being told that she is scary and not enough of a lady will connect with Melissa Lewis, who is incredible at her position as commander, and she will notice the men around her respect her. They are even her friends.

The story is classified as science fiction, but the wonderful thing about Ridley Scott’s newest film is the fiction part is only barely fiction. Not only are the implications of this future so filled with hope, but they are incredibly possible. That means the hope elicited in this film can do more than give us a fuzzy feeling inside as we come out of the theatre; it can show the next generation that they can change their future for the better.

Entertainment can often help us understand our potential

In the 1950’s, Walt Disney broadcast the show Man In Space on ABC to over 40 million viewers. Part live action, part animation, the show entertained audiences with television that was rooted in science. It was a huge force in helping Americans both understand and want to put a man in space, on the moon, and beyond. With movies like Interstellar and now The Martian, the entertainment world is starting to challenge its audience to believe in a brighter future by providing the public stories that can begin to tell us of adventure, exploration, perseverance, and the pure capacity of human will. Seeing these possibilities, we can begin to believe in that ourselves.

Here at The Mars Generation, that is the future we subscribe to. “The mission of The Mars Generation is to excite young people and adults about space and STEM education and foster an understanding of the importance of these two elements to the future of humankind on Earth.”

Out of all the films your family will see in the coming months, I propose this is the most important. It will be the movie for our next generation of astronauts, rocket scientists, and a whole host of other people who don’t understand the word “impossible.” This, and hopefully others like it that will soon follow, can show the youth of America that they are indeed, the Mars generation.

Author:

Rebecca Moore is part of the media team at The Mars Generation, focusing on public relations. She has a background in online writing and a passion for all things space.