Damien Hirst will apparantly be the first artist in outer space - that is, if you don't count the Arecibo message as "art".

By December next year, Hirst's painting will be on Mars, hitching a ride on the Beagle 2 spacecraft......

You can get a chance to see the artwork as it will be exhibited at the White Cube in London's Hoxton from Friday 29.

Hirst has created an instrument calibration which will be attached to the Beagle 2 spacecraft, the Beagle 2 must survive the rocket launch and the seven month voyage through space before its decent onto the surface of Mars.

The spot painting is the reference against which cameras and a variety of spectrometers will be calibrated and has been specially prepared to qualify for space flight with the pigments being carefully selected, due to their relevance to Mars and the needs of the instruments. The colours include the "Mars pigments" and other mineral bases.