Inspired by xenzag's "Footprints on Mars" idea.
For about five grand, you take control of the arm of a Mars rover and write your name in the soil while a video of it is recorded and sent back.
The time lag to get the signal from your writing pad to the rover's arm would mean you would have to wait for the signal to get to mars, move the arm and then wait for the video signal to get back, but it would be in real time other than that.
I know people pay pretty good money to get a brick with their name put into stadiums and amusement parks so being able to say you wrote your name on Martian or Lunar soil would be something that would beat that on the coolness scale.
Might be a way for private space ventures to get some funding. Assuming you could get it booked solid, one rover writing 24 hours a day, 10 seconds per signature (real time, you don't get a second chance, if you blow it, it gets written on Mars just like if you were really there. Very important to the process.) $30,000 a minute, is $43,200,000 a day or over fifteen billion dollars a year. That could easily fund a privately run Mars colony project.-- doctorremulac3, Apr 27 2014 Mars Rover "Accidentally" Leaves Penis-Shaped Track http://www.theregis...24/nasa_penis_mars/ [Spacecoyote, Apr 27 2014] http://www.halfbake...n_20Mars#1177153444 one of my first postings on hb [xenzag, Apr 27 2014] MoonLogo [xaviergisz, Apr 27 2014] I'd suspect we'd see more of these [link].
Incidentally, Curiosity has holes in it's tracks that spell out "JPL" (for it's maker, the Jet Propulsion Lab) in morse code, ostensibly used to help measure distances in imagery.-- Spacecoyote, Apr 27 2014 I'd go further and offer advertising. How much does a Moonshot really cost ? The R & D has already been done, there's just some number-crunching, and of course the actual mission, to pay for.
So, if a company wants to underwrite a Lunar expedition, they get paid by having their logo spray-painted onto the surface of the Moon to be there in perpetua. Regarding taste, or lack thereof, the logo wouldn't be completely visible except by telescope.
So you could look at the sky at night and, if you knew where to look, see a small reddish dot on the Moon; with a telescope the Coca-Cola trademark becomes visible.. or golden arches, or whatever.-- FlyingToaster, Apr 27 2014 On Mars, wouldn't the dust storms obliterate things?-- MaxwellBuchanan, Apr 27 2014 Yes.
For $5,000, you'd be able to say you wrote your name in Martian soil and get a video of you doing it and a picture of the signature suitable for framing, but it would be as temporary as any other writing in soil or sand.-- doctorremulac3, Apr 27 2014 More to the point to write "martians suck. the borg" and then you can watch the two space fleets battle it out from a safe distance.
Assuming the Martian dust is electro-statically moveable, then no reason not to have the capacity to re-write after a dust storm..-- not_morrison_rm, Apr 28 2014 Or you could carve or etch into a rock.-- Spacecoyote, Apr 28 2014 Extrapolations are funny when they don't take into account dilution & other factors.
$30,000/minute = 15B/year? Not really.
Well, what's the value of being the FIRST name on the moon? And, what's the value of the 3,153,600th? (Which you cross in the first year.)-- sophocles, Apr 28 2014 And, if this really fetched a $5,000 price point, I'd expect to see copy-cat sites with $100 price tags, of course with red sand in a closet with a webcam.-- sophocles, Apr 28 2014 By the way, hey NASA, if you're listening, you should have sent out memos to the following companies: Coke, General Motors, Exxon, Apple, Daimler, Honda, Volkswagen Group and said you'll write anything they want in the Martian soil with the Mars rover and send a picture back for ten million bucks. Maybe 15 minutes work you get a big chunk of dough plus the publicity it would have brought to the program.
The clowns at the Jet Propulsion lab are already accomplished artists. (You can't tell me that wiener in the link was an accident)-- doctorremulac3, Apr 28 2014 random, halfbakery