You can have NASA send your name to Mars on a rover
NASA’s Mars 2020 rover is scheduled to launch next year, and it could be carrying a chip with your name on it!
To get the public aware and excited about the upcoming mission, NASA has released a form on their website giving people the opportunity to send their names – stenciled on chips – onboard the rover.
“As we get ready to launch this historic Mars mission, we want everyone to share in this journey of exploration,” said Thomas Zurbuchen, associate administrator for NASA’s Science Mission Directorate.
The 2,300-pound rover is scheduled to launch in July of next year, and land less than a year later in February 2021. The goal of this rover is to search for signs of past life around an old river delta in the Jezero crater, in an attempt to open the doors for possible human exploration.
And in case you were wondering, no, the rover will not have thousands of chips on board! Most likely, there will only be one or two. The team at NASA will be using an electron beam to create text that is 0.1% the width of a human hair, which means more than one million names will fit on one chip.
Here at Liberty Science Center, we love NASA’s creative way of getting the public involved. It’s totally in line with our mission to inspire the next generation of scientists and engineers and excite learners of all ages about the power, promise, and pure fun of science and technology.
Be sure to submit your name soon – the application is open until Sept. 30, 2019!
Interested in more space stories like this? Catch a show in LSC’s Jennifer Chalsty Planetarium, the biggest planetarium in the Western Hemisphere. Our all-live show, “Wonders of the Night Sky,” always sets aside a portion for LSC Space News Now stories.
