Case Study: NASA achieves robust public engagement and crowd-generated insights for Mars exploration with IdeaScale

The Mars Program Planning Group’s Evolving Conversation

NASA’s Mars Program Planning Group (MPPG) was tasked with developing a program-level architecture for robotic Mars exploration that supports the President’s goal of human missions to Mars orbit in the 2030s while remaining aligned with the 2011 NRC Decadal Survey. Alongside this technical planning challenge, MPPG wanted a way to inform and engage the public as missions like the Curiosity rover approached landing.

MPPG launched an IdeaScale forum where nearly 1,300 citizens contributed 559 submissions in three months, sparking sustained Q&A and idea-sharing—with many top suggestions focused on human presence, settlement and terraforming. The forum generated new site content (a 30-question answer page) and a 12-video expert series, and has positioned MPPG to deepen public involvement in future activities such as data analysis, brainstorming and coding.

NASA

Rocky Lind

Information and Communications Coordinator