The mission to colonize the red planet continues. While more than 200,000 people have applied for this epic-like attempt to conquer Mars, a short list of 1000 applicants for the Mars One Mission has already been released. A student of Rutgers is among those shortlisted.

The Mars One mission has caught the interest of Brian Robles, 21-year-old public health major in the School of Arts and Sciences at Rutgers University.

A report from Rutgers Web site said Robles always wanted to be an astronaut. Upon knowing the plan of a Dutch group called Mars One to form colony in Mars and started to look for people who wanted to be the first among those people to live in the red planet, Robles took no second thoughts to apply.

"When my parents heard I was applying, they thought it was crazy," says Robles on a report in Rutgers Today. "But I don't think they thought it was really true. Once I got picked in this round, I think it became a little more real."

Being a part of the shortlisted applicants, Robles is closer to his dream of living outside the Earth.

Mars One, is a non-profit Dutch organization, which aims to create the first human settlement in Mars. With this attempt, the organization wants to start sending a group of 40 men and 40 women to Mars in 2022. These people will be the first batch of human colony as the organization plans to send more batches eventually years after to widen the colony.

In connection with this, the Mars One announced on March 27 in its Web site, that they are launching a simulation project to mock the red planet here on Earth. The Mars human outpost aims to give those humans who wanted to be among the first people settlement in the planet a taste on Martian life.

"We are very eager to get started constructing actual hardware for our mission that is important for training future Mars One crews and preparing them for their life on Mars. We are going from theory to practice," Bas Lansdorp, co-founder of Mars One said on the press release published on Mars One Web site.

The question now is whether the Mars One mission will push through with the huge fund needed for the project as well as the huge risks everybody will be taking. The pursuit and the success of the mission will be a huge breakthrough in science and astronomy in the world's history.

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