NASA puts 10.9+m names aboard Mars rover

NASA has announced that it put 10,932,295 names on its Perseverance Mars rover at Kennedy Space Center in Florida on March 16.

Perseverance is scheduled to launch this summer. It will land at Mars’ Jezero Crater on Feb. 18, 2021.

For its “Send Your Name to Mars” campaign, NASA invited people from all over the globe to submit their names to ride aboard the Red Planet rover.

Electron beam was used to stencil the names onto three fingernail-sized silicon chips. The essays of the 155 finalists in the agency’s “Name the Rover” contest were also stenciled onto the chips.

The silicon chips were then attached to an aluminum plate on Perseverance.

The rover’s launch schedule has not been impacted by the coronavirus at the moment, said NASA.

Other than installing the chips with the names on the rover, the Perseverance assembly, test and launch operations team performed many other activities recently.

On March 21, the team started reconfiguring Perseverance to enable it to ride atop the Atlas V rocket. The reconfigurations “included stowing the robotic arm, lowering and locking in place the remote sensing mast and high-gain antenna and retracting its legs and wheels.”

A robotic scientist, the Perseverance rover weighs just less than 2,300 pounds, or 1,043 kilograms. It is designed to help look for signs of past microbial life on the Red Planet. It will also help pave the way for human exploration of Mars, characterize the planet’s geology and climate and collect samples for future return to Earth.

Manufactured by NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, the Perseverance Mars rover is almost the same in design to the Curiosity rover. It will carry seven scientific instruments to analyze the Martian surface at Jezero Crater. There will be 23 cameras in total and two microphones aboard the rover. Perseverance will also be accompanied by the Mars Helicopter to help it scout for location to examine.