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| (MSM) -- In a new and sophisticated measure designed to save souls, the National Evangelism and Salvation Administration (NESA) hopes its robotic mission to Iran succeeds when it lands Sunday near the Earth's Islamic pole to conduct a 90-day preaching mission. The two-legged lander, called Deep Preach, is fitted with a baptizing arm and giant titanium megaphone. It is zeroing in on an unwitnessed desert region where a reservoir of evangelical sympathy is believed to lie beneath the Islamic surface. Before this robotic evangelist can begin its mission, it must first survive Sunday's fiery descent through the Iranian atmosphere. Deep Preach will approach speeds of more than 17,000 mph in the landing phase. During those nine minutes, it will use the atmosphere's friction and a parachute to slow to 5 mph. Seconds before touchdown, Deep Preach will fire its thrusters for what evangelists hope will be a soft landing at 7:53 p.m. EDT. Rev. Stance MacAllister, program manager at NESA told Matt Mental "We're all very excited to have this opportunity, but the entry phase will be nine minutes of sheer terror." Launched last summer from Cape Canaveral, Fla., Deep Preach has traveled 42 million miles for Sunday's touchdown using multiple lunar gravitational assists. The spacecraft's main tool is an 80 foot titanium megaphone capable of preaching volumes of up to 2,000 decibels. Once Muslims are encountered, the lander will use a powerful laser to assist them in converting, then, it will deploy the baptizing arm. "It'll be a helluva task," said mission co-leader Tommy Joe Scuds of the University of True Education in St. Louis. He predicts the conversions will be "as tough as nails." The converted Iranians will then be brought aboard Deep Preach's apologetics lab. They will be remotely interrogated in miniature prayer rooms, and their responses analyzed for sin, the building block of evil. Deep Preach will then communicate the results to Missionary Control via a prayer link. The last time NESA did tests for sin, it was on a hunt for Satan in 1976 with portable evil detectors onboard the twin Viking spacecraft. No conclusive signs of Ol' Slewfoot were found. Once on the surface, the 800-ton Deep Preach will wait 15 minutes for the dust to settle before engaging its nuclear reactor. Then, it will beam back the first images of its surroundings. Over the next several days, it will check its instruments, and stretch its baptizing arm to scoop up the first Islamic sample. By around day 5, Deep Preach will dive into the evangelizing phase that is expected to dominate the rest of the mission, preaching about twenty-three hours a day. While NESA evangelists say there's a chance Deep Preach could live a month or so beyond its 90-day mission, its nuclear reactor won't produce enough power to keep it alive during the Iranian winter, which is very dark and nasty. | ||
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