Care home residents join latest NASA mission to Mars

Residents from a Dorset care home have participated in the maiden voyage of NASA’s Orion space capsule.

The Colten Care home in Brockenhurst in the New Forest submitted residents’ names to NASA to be featured in a microchip alongside more than a million names on the unmanned ship.

Activities organiser at Woodpeckers in Brockenhurst, Shirley Smith, decided to put forward residents’ names after reading about the mission. She said: "I'm a great space enthusiast so when I read about this I thought it was too good an opportunity to miss.

"We've presented our residents with official NASA boarding passes and everyone feels part of what looks set to be an historic mission."

Alongside the microchip, the space capsule contained both historic and significant objects including a fossil from a Tyrannosaurus Rex and a sample of lunar soil.

NASA launched Orion on a Delta rocket from Cape Canaveral, Florida, on 5 December, where it travelled more than 3,500 miles above the Earth to test its capabilities.

The spacecraft orbited the earth twice and detached the space capsule which re-entered the atmosphere and landed in the Pacific Ocean to be recovered.

Orion was developed to carry humans and successfully completed a test flight in preparation for its journey to Mars, landing back in the Pacific Ocean intact, after surviving the flight and intense temperatures reached during orbit.

The development of the space craft coincides with the creation of a new rocket due to be debuted by 2018. The first launch of space craft with crew aboard to Mars is anticipated to be as early as 2020.

NASA’s associate administrator for human exploration, Bill Gerstenmaier said: "We as a species are meant to press humanity further into the solar system and this is a first step.”

Colten Care is a family owned company consisting of 19 homes located in Hampshire and Dorset.