Mar 19, 2015 | Mars, Media Publications, Read
While most of us Garden Route Earthlings will be going about our business on a fine autumn day, Adriana Marais – firstborn of Plettenberg Bay CBD dwellers Marie-Anna and Theo Marais – might well be wandering down the Champs-Elysees in Paris, France, with a particular spring in her step.
The evening of 18 March, Adriana Marais will be the only South African sharing the stage with some of the sharpest ladies on the planet, as one of 15 recipients worldwide of a L’Oreal-Unesco International Rising Talent Grant for Women in Science. Last year Adriana, 31, was one of 200 Young South African achievers recognised by the Mail & Guardian. She says with a bright smile: “My research is what makes me get up in the morning.”
Feb 18, 2015 | Mars, Media Publications, Read
Cape Town – Adriana Marais from KwaZulu-Natal, Divashen Govender from Durban, Kobus Vermeulen from Pretoria (pictured below) and two other candidates, only known as Edwin and Alexandra, are the five South Africans who are still in the running to go on a kamikaze-type mission to Planet Mars in 2024.
Feb 17, 2015 | Mars, Media Publications, Read
The objective of Dutch non-profit Mars One is simple: to establish a permanent human settlement on the red planet. Mars One will begin training candidates for space travel up until its 2024 planned launch, when – if all goes well – teams of successful candidates from around the world will form part of the first human colony on Mars. Adriana Marais, a masters student at the University of KwaZulu-Natal, who the Mail & Guardianfirst spoke to when she made it through round one, and is now one of the final four South Africans, said: “What the first colonisers will do on Mars is really the pinnacle of four billion years of evolution.”
Aug 22, 2014 | Media Publications, Quantum Biology, Read
Credit: Originally published by the Mail & Guardian. In the beginning, during the first billion years (Gyr) of the Earth’s 4.5Gyr life, space debris bombarded the planet. High-energy collisions with meteorites up to 500km in diameter frequently disintegrated...
Jul 28, 2014 | Mars, Media Publications, Read
The Mars One programme is offering civilians, including South Africans, the opportunity to create a human colony on Mars. Is this a revival of the golden age of discovery, when explorers left their homes to begin new civilisations? Or is it a “suicide mission” in which people die in space while we watch from Earth, more than 200 million kilometres away?
It is the next frontier of exploration: space travel and colonising new planets. Six hundred years ago, explorers took to the high seas, forsaking land for months, on journeys from which they may have never returned. They went in search of exotic, “undiscovered” lands. In 2014, space travel is the new frontier, filled with the unknown and the taste of adventure.
Jun 18, 2013 | Mars, Media Publications, Read
The last time man set foot on another planet was during the Apollo 17 moon landing in 1972! Now, thanks to the Mars One project, people could be walking on Mars in 2024 for the first time… and two UKZN students may be among them!
Ms Adriana Marais, a PhD candidate at UKZN’s Centre for Quantum Technology, and Mr Divashen Govender, a BSc student studying Applied Mathematics and Physics, have both made it into the Mars One final 100 as a result of personal online interviews with Dr Norbert Kraft, the Chief Medical Officer of the mission.
