NASA Seeks Intergalactic Poetry

Earth to poets!

NASA is inviting poets and space-aficionados to pen their best haiku to celebrate the voyage of MAVEN: a spacecraft that will leave Earth in November to study the Martian atmosphere. Managers of the MAVEN-voyage began accepting haiku submissions on May 1 and they will continue to accept haiku submissions until July 15th. From July 15th to July 29th, NASA will allow the public to vote for its favorite three submissions. On August 8th, NASA will announce the three haiku that garnered the most votes.

NASA plans to display all three poems on the MAVEN website—and to give the poems three spots aboard the MAVEN spacecraft, which will launch in November.

To submit your intergalactically-inspired haiku, visit the official website of MAVEN ("Mars Atmosphere and Volatile Evolution Mission").

And in case you were wondering, "For the MAVEN contest, we are defining a haiku as a poem made of three lines; the first and last lines must have exactly five syllables each and the middle line must have exactly seven syllables."

Brush up on your haiku (or "hokku") in our Learning Lab: here!