Haiku: Mars MAVEN

A blastoff from the past?

Continuing with the celestial theme, I have a haiku that was submitted to NASA way back in 2013. Yes, I’ve been writing bad poetry for very long time…

NASA set up a campaign where people could submit art or a haiku to accompany the MAVEN Mars probe. This is from the “**Going to Mars campaign**” website:

The Going to Mars campaign allowed members of the general public to participate in the mission and “go to Mars” with the MAVEN spacecraft in 2013.

The campaign had three parts; a bumper sticker art contest for students 5 to 17 years old, a “message to Mars” haiku contest for all ages, and a name entry form. Art and haiku contest entries were voted on by the public to determine winners.

All 377 art entries, haiku entries that received at least 2 votes (1,073 out of 12,530 total entries), and 96,899 valid names submitted to the site were written to an archival M-disc DVD and attached to the spacecraft. The winning art entry was used as a label for the DVD.

I don’t know if my entry made the cut. If it did, it would require lot of effort to read, so I thought I’d add it here!

For those using a screen reader, the haiku is:

Reaching out in peace To the ancient god of war; The stars surrender

To see links to my other haiku, please check this ***LIST! To see links to all my writing on Medium, click [HERE](https://www.patreon.com/posts/2026-one-stop-147164409)* (via Patreon). And if you read and enjoy my writing, please consider following me [here on Medium](https://wokrsmith.medium.com/)**!

Photo Credits:

The photo used for this post was taken by the **NASA Hubble Space Telescope on [Unsplash](https://unsplash.com/).**