Since I had never heard of the Mars Society prior to class I had no idea what to expect when going to its website. One of the first things I noticed was a box on the left side of the page asking for donations. I am always a bit weary about any organization asking for money; especially if I have no idea exactly what these people do. Why do they need my money? What are they going to use it for? Is this a legitimate organization? Could this be a scam? Since we were asked to visit this site for class I was pretty sure that they weren't trying to swindle me. However, I still had no idea what exactly this site was and who was running it. It turns out that the goal of this society is pretty much the same as any other non-government funded organization: to educate and promote the ideas of the organization to the general public so as to one day see an overall goal realized. The overall last goal of the Mars Society is to see human exploration and eventual colonization of Mars. The Founding Declaration of the Mars Society was able to shed even more light onto the subject for me. It includes all of the reasons why they think we should invest in Mars exploration. Some, such as We Must Go For Our Future, are more convincing than others such as We Must Go For The Challenge. I don't think doing something because it will be a challenge is a good enough reason to justify doing it. However, Mars could very well be the key to our future since it has already been proven that it can sustain life.
What is most helpful about the Mars Society website is all of the news feeds that are featured on the main page. It looks as though the website is updated very often with any and all news that is relevant to Mars or Mars exploration. It will definitely be a great resource for assignments and papers for this class. Good to know.
The Enterprise Mission website is a little hard to take seriously on first glance. It seems more of a science fiction show fan site than a credible source for information on Mars. Everything in one way or another makes reference to Star Trek. Maybe if I were a fan of the show I would think this were kind of cool. However, since I in no way am it just comes off as a little silly. What's more is that the first half of the page seems to be made up of advertisements of some kind which further contribute to its unprofessional and amateur nature. However, after scrolling past all of this the site turns into a resource for many interesting articles and papers about Mars. Many include actual photographs taken on Mars. So it turns out that this website is actually a lot more scholarly than it first appeared.
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