The Viking program consisted of a pair of identical American space probes, Viking 1 and Viking 2, which landed on Mars in 1976. Each spacecraft was composed of two main parts: an orbiter designed to photograph the surface of Mars from orbit, and a lander designed to study the planet from the surface. The orbiters also served as communication relays for the landers once they touched down.
Mars Express is a space exploration mission being conducted by the European Space Agency (ESA). The Mars Express mission is exploring the planet Mars, and is the first planetary mission attempted by the agency. "Express" originally referred to the speed and efficiency with which the spacecraft was designed and built. However, "Express" also describes the spacecraft's relatively short interplanetary voyage, a result of being launched when the orbits of Earth and Mars brought them closer than they had been in about 60,000 years.
Public art is art in any media whose form, function and meaning are created for the general public through a public process. It is a specific art genre with its own professional and critical discourse. Public art is visually and physically accessible to the public; it is installed in public space in both outdoor and indoor settings. Public art seeks to embody public or universal concepts rather than commercial, partisan or personal concepts or interests. Notably, public art is also the direct or indirect product of a public process of creation, procurement, and/or maintenance.
Mars Science Laboratory (MSL) is a robotic space probe mission to Mars launched by NASA on November 26, 2011, which successfully landed Curiosity, a Mars rover, in Gale Crater on August 6, 2012. The overall objectives include investigating Mars' habitability, studying its climate and geology, and collecting data for a human mission to Mars. The rover carries a variety of scientific instruments designed by an international team.
Marina Abramović is a Serbian conceptual and performance artist. Her work explores body art, endurance art, feminist art, the relationship between the performer and audience, the limits of the body, and the possibilities of the mind. Being active for over four decades, Abramović refers to herself as the "grandmother of performance art". She pioneered a new notion of identity by bringing in the participation of observers, focusing on "confronting pain, blood, and physical limits of the body". In 2007, she founded the Marina Abramović Institute (MAI), a non-profit foundation for performance art.
ExoMars is an astrobiology programme of the European Space Agency (ESA).
"Space art" is the term for a genre of modern artistic expression that strives to show the wonders of the Universe. Like other genres, space art has many facets and encompasses realism, impressionism, hardware art, sculpture, abstract imagery, even zoological art. Though artists have been making art with astronomical elements for a long time, the genre of space art itself is still in its infancy, having begun only when humanity gained the ability to look off our world and artistically depicted what we see out there. Whatever the stylistic path, the artist is generally attempting to communicate ideas somehow related to space, often including an appreciation of the infinite variety and vastness which surrounds us. In some cases, artists who consider themselves space artists use more than illustration and painting to communicate scientific discoveries or works depicting space, some have had the opportunity to work directly with space flight technology and scientists in attempts to expand the arts, humanities, and cultural expression relative to space exploration.
Quantum Quest: A Cassini Space Odyssey is a 2010 animated educational science fiction adventure film, written by Harry 'Doc' Kloor and directed by Kloor and Dan St. Pierre, that takes the viewer on an atomic adventure in space.
Nasser Azam is a British contemporary artist, living and working in London.
Cyberformance refers to live theatrical performances in which remote participants are enabled to work together in real time through the medium of the internet, employing technologies such as chat applications or purpose-built, multiuser, real-time collaborative software. Cyberformance is also known as online performance, networked performance, telematic performance, and digital theatre; there is as yet no consensus on which term should be preferred, but cyberformance has the advantage of compactness. For example, it is commonly employed by users of the UpStage platform to designate a special type of Performance art activity taking place in a cyber-artistic environment.
The Civilians is an investigative theatre company in New York City founded in 2001 by Artistic Director, Steve Cosson. The Civilians artists pursue their inquiries using interviews, community residencies, research, and other methods. Working with a combination of journalism and art, the Civilians creates theatrical events that seek to promote inquisitions of current issues. According to Variety Magazine, The Civilians "travels far and wide researching a piece around a given subject, conducting interviews and comparing notes along the way, sometimes for years."
Mars to Stay missions propose astronauts sent to Mars for the first time should intend to stay. Unused emergency return vehicles would be recycled into settlement construction as soon as the habitability of Mars becomes evident to the initial pioneers. Mars to Stay missions are advocated both to reduce cost and to ensure permanent settlement of Mars. Among many notable Mars to Stay advocates, former Apollo astronaut Buzz Aldrin has been particularly outspoken, suggesting in numerous forums "Forget the Moon, Let’s Head to Mars!" and, in June 2013, Aldrin promoted a crewed mission "to homestead Mars and become a two-planet species". In August 2015, Aldrin, in association with the Florida Institute of Technology, presented a "master plan", for NASA consideration, for astronauts, with a "tour of duty of ten years", to colonize Mars before the year 2040. The Mars Underground, Mars Homestead Project / Mars Foundation, Mars One, and Mars Artists Community advocacy groups and business organizations have also adopted Mars to Stay policy initiatives.
Arts in Second Life is an artistic area of a 3D social network that has served, since 2003, as a platform for various artistic pursuits and exhibitions.
Terrestrial analogue sites are places on Earth with assumed past or present geological, environmental or biological conditions of a celestial body such as the Moon or Mars. Analogue sites are used in the frame of space exploration to either study geological or biological processes observed on other planets, or to prepare astronauts for surface extra-vehicular activity.
Angelo Vermeulen is a Belgian space systems researcher, biologist and artist. In 2009 he co-founded SEADS, an international transdisciplinary collective of artists, scientists, engineers, and activists Its goal is to reshape the future through critical inquiry and hands-on experimentation. Biomodd is one of their most well-known art projects and consists of a worldwide series of co-created interactive art installations in which computers coexist with internal living ecosystems. For the last ten years, he has been collaborating with the European Space Agency’s MELiSSA program on biological life support for space and in 2013 he was crew commander of one of the NASA-funded HI-SEAS Mars mission simulations in Hawai'i. Currently, he works at Delft University of Technology on advanced concepts for interstellar exploration. His work proposes a bio-inspired design approach to deal with the unpredictability inherent to interstellar travel. He is a Senior TED Fellow and was selected in 2017 as one of the Top 5 Tech Pioneers from Belgium by the newspaper De Tijd.
Sunara Begum is an English visual and performance artist, filmmaker, photographer and writer of Bangladeshi descent. She uses installation, film, photography, live performance, sonics and text. Begum is the founder and director of Chand Aftara, a creation centre. Begum is also the co-founder of Living Legacies, a traditional music archive in Gambia and New Horizons Africa, a music and arts festival in Lagos, Nigeria.
The Starmus International Festival is an international gathering focused on celebrating astronomy, space exploration, music, art, and other sciences such as biology and chemistry. It was founded by Garik Israelian, an astronomer at the Institute for Astrophysics in Tenerife, Canary Islands, Spain and Brian May of the rock band Queen.
Bonnie Ora Sherk was an American landscape-space artist, performance artist, landscape planner, and educator. She was the founder of The Farm, and A Living Library. Sherk was a professional artist who exhibited her work in museums and galleries around the world. Her work has also been published in art books, journals, and magazines. Her work is considered a pioneering contribution to Eco Art.
Platform 4 is a national performance and visual arts company based in Winchester, Hampshire, in the UK.
Vera Mulyani is an Indonesian-born, French-raised architect, filmmaker, children's author, as well as Founder and CEO of Mars City Design, a collaborative platform created to explore the concept of livability and sustainability on Mars as well as Earth. She has been called a Marschitect.
