A 30-minute drive north of Pittsburgh this weekend would have landed you on another planet.
Mars, the small Butler County community, transformed itself into an out-of-this-world experience to celebrate the new year on the planet of the same name Friday and Saturday.
The sixth installment of the borough’s biennial Mars New Year celebration was a two-day community festival dedicated to celebrating the new year on the Red Planet, offering immersive space and science-related activities for all ages.
Saturday afternoon, live rock music was the background as hundreds of people clad in martian green visited vendors lining the streets and selling Mars T-shirts, toy solar systems, artwork and more.
“I think it’s shaping up to be one of our best,” said Mars Mayor Gregg Hartung. “We are welcoming some innovative changes.”
Some of those changes included a captivating light show featuring 200 drones that illuminated the skies above Mars, model rocket launches from the Pittsburgh Rocket Club and the Martian Melodies Orchestra, composed of musicians who played along to images from NASA’s space missions.
Pittsburgh-area students who competed in the Mars STEAM Challenge — where students create science projects related to Mars — were honored for their efforts Saturday, including Jeeya Ullal and Sahasra Mungi, two sixth-grade students from the Pine-Richland School District who won the grand prize: $500.
Their project was a model of a space station that could be built on Mars, complete with a greenhouse and irrigation system.
“We even grew our own chia seeds and incorporated them into the greenhouse,” Sahasra said, adding the win felt “really good.”
Another key component of the festivities were space ambassadors from NASA who delivered several presentations on space exploration, including Cranberry native Mackenzie Sloan. The Seneca Valley High School graduate now works at the Kennedy Space Center in Florida as a team lead on NASA’s Artemis program, integrating, testing and launching the rocket that will take astronauts back to the moon by 2026.
Other guests included Soyeon Yi, South Korea’s first and only astronaut, and Jim Green, the longest-serving director of NASA’s Planetary Science Division, its former chief scientist, and founder of Space Science Endeavors.
“This really is just such a wonderful community event,” said Marcy Bogdanich, a Mars resident and a volunteer at the festival since its first event in 2015. “The mayor has done a bang-up job of putting space and science [together] and getting the kids interested.”