Grant Developed from Uwingu’s New Mars Mapping Project, Astronomers Without Borders Encourages Participation in Uwingu’s Mars Mapping Project

Space startup Uwingu announced today a grant to Astronomers Without Borders (AWB), a global community of astronomy enthusiasts, educators, and others around the world interested in astronomy and the sky. Uwingu’s grant to AWB comes from funds raised in the past two weeks from Uwingu’s new Mars Crater Mapping project.

The project was established to help create a $10M fund for Uwingu grants to support a wide range of new space projects with individual space researchers and educators hurt by budget cuts, as well as space companies and organizations like AWB. Uwingu has previously made grants to a wide range of organizations including the International Dark-Sky Association (IDA), the Galileo Teachers Training Program (GTTP), the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence (SETI), and the Mars One project.

Uwingu’s Mars map grandfathers in all the already named craters on Mars, opening the remainder up for naming by people around the globe. Prices for naming craters vary, depending on the size of the crater, and begin at $5 dollars. Uwingu makes a shareable Web link and a naming certificate available to each crater namer for each newly named crater.

Mike Simmons, President of AWB remarked, “Astronomers Without Borders is honored to receive this grant based on Uwingu’s innovative Mars Crater Mapping project. Uwingu’s mission of public engagement matches ours, and we encourage our members to participate in this project to publicly fund space exploration and education.”

Dr. Alan Stern, the CEO of Uwingu added, “We’re very proud to award the first grant from our latest project to Astronomers Without Borders, an international organization dedicated to educating the public about astronomy. Given the popularity we’re seeing from people who want to help name craters on our new Mars map, we expect to generate many more grants as our Mars Mapping Project moves toward its goal of completing the naming of the over 500,000 unnamed, scientifically cataloged craters on Mars by the end of 2014, the 50th year of Mars exploration.”

Anyone around the world can participate The Mars Crater Naming Project at Uwingu’s web site, www.uwingu.com.