It's now time to sign up for NASA's next mission to Mars.

It's this time of year again, when NASA gives you the opportunity to ship your name to another heavenly body. This time, the destination is Mars and the shipping service is the future rover of NASA, March 2020, which will head to the red planet in – you guessed it – in 2020.

The first mission of the rover is to help us answer this fundamental question: has Mars already hosted an extraterrestrial life? The robot is equipped with tools and instruments that will help scientists determine if the planet has been able to house life in the past. In addition to this, the rover will also drill and collect samples of Martian soil. He will then leave these samples on the ground, where they could eventually be picked up one day by another spacecraft and brought back to Earth.

And while the March 2020 rover is doing all that, your name could be long for the ride. If you give your name before September 30th, Jet Propulsion Laboratory's NASA engineers will engrave it on a silicon chip with an electron beam, then the mobile will follow it along the way. The names are going to be pretty thin, about a thousandth of the width of a human hair. It's small enough that over a million names can appear on a single dime-sized chip – but big enough for all Martian microbes to read (I'm not kidding … Martians do not can not read).

NASA was offering this opportunity to the public before, when it landed on Mars in 2018 and when it sent the OSIRIS-REx spacecraft on the asteroid Bennu. And like any experienced traveler, you'll receive a boarding pass and frequent flyer miles. Seeing that InSight travelers have traveled about 300 million kilometers from their trip, the residents of March 2020 are also on the cusp of getting serious arguments. Unfortunately, it seems doubtful that Delta Airlines accepts them.