Red (Planet) Rover, Red (Planet) Rover, Send (Enter Your Name Here) On Over!

It will be several years before the first humans set foot on Mars. NASA is giving the public the opportunity to send their names to the Red Planet with NASA's Mars 2020 rover. The names will be etched on microchips. The rover's launch window is July 17 - August 5, 2020 from Cape Canaveral Air Force Station, Florida. The spacecraft is expected to land on Mars' Jezero Crater on February 18, 2021. Its mission duration is at least one Mars year (687 Earth days).

Here is the NASA link: https://mars.nasa.gov/participate/send-your-name/mars2020/

The rover is a robotic machine that weighs more than 2,300 pounds. Its mission is to search for signs of past microbial life, characterize Mars' climate and geology and collect samples to bring back to Earth.

Image from Internet

The opportunity to send your name to Mars comes with a souvenir boarding pass and "frequent flyer" points.

Image from Internet

The Colonel and I (and Yam too) have already submitted our names and printed out our boarding passes. I currently have 313,586,649 Frequent Flyer Club points.

From now until September 30, 2019, you too can add your name to the list.

The Microdevices Lab at NASA's Jet Propulsion Lab in Pasadena, California, will use an electron beam to etch the submitted names (like mine) onto a silicon chip with lines of text smaller than one-thousandth the width of a human hair. At that size, more than a million names can be inscribed on a single dime-size microchip. The chip or chips will ride on the rover under a glass cover. As of the "penning" of this post, 6,635,201 names have been submitted.

My name on Mars! How cool is that?