Get it out there...

From: Retronaut

"I have not entered a literary contest since I was 11, when I was utterly convinced my poem was going to win (it didn't). But I think I'm going to have to brush up by poetry skills after learning that Nasa is looking for haikus in the form of a 'message to Mars,' and will take the three best, on a DVD, on board its Maven spaceship, due to begin a mission in November to study the upper Martian atmosphere.  

     I have said before that I'm a little obsessed with Mars exploration and Martian literature – Kim Stanley Robinson, Ray Bradbury, Philip K Dick, Robert A Heinlein."
— Alison Flood, The Guardian
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"NASA is inviting members of the public to submit their names and a personal message online for a DVD to be carried aboard a spacecraft that will study the Martian upper atmosphere.
     The DVD will be in NASA's Mars Atmosphere and Volatile Evolution (MAVEN) spacecraft, which is scheduled for launch in November. The DVD is part of the mission's Going to Mars Campaign coordinated at the University of Colorado at Boulder's Laboratory for Atmospheric and Space Physics (CU/LASP).
     The DVD will carry every name submitted. The public also is encouraged to submit a message in the form of a three-line poem, or haiku. However, only three haikus will be selected. The deadline for all submissions is July 1. An online public vote to determine the top three messages to be placed on the DVD will begin July 15."
— NASA
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Canadian Author Adrian Barnes Shortlisted for the Arthur C Clarke Award

"Reinforcing science fiction's image as a boys club the UK's most prestigious prize for the genre, the Arthur C Clarke award, has announced an all-male shortlist – for only the second time in its history.
     The six books in the running for the Arthur C Clarke – a mix of titles by major SF writers Kim Stanley Robinson and Ken MacLeod with lesser known debuts – follow an all-male shortlist for the reader-decided British Science Fiction Association prize, which was won earlier this week by Adam Roberts for Jack Glass.
     Roberts failed to make the cut for the Clarke award, however, pushed out by Robinson's story of an inhabited solar system 300 years in the future, 2312, Scottish award-winner MacLeod's dystopian vision of a London where genetic defects can be wiped from unborn children, Intrusion, and Nick Harkaway's acclaimed Angelmaker, a whirlwind race to save the world from a 1950s doomsday machine. Canadian author Adrian Barnes, published by tiny press Bluemoose, is in the running for Nod, in which humanity's sudden inability to sleep has devastating consequences, Chris Beckett for Dark Eden, where the incestuous descendants of two stranded astronauts try to make a life for themselves on a far flung planet, and Peter Heller for the post-apocalyptic The Dog Stars, set in a world destroyed by the flu pandemic."
— Alison Flood, The Guardian
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Buy all the books on the shortlist here...