Put your name on NASA's March 2020 rover (in lowercase letters) – GeekWire

Space fans have been sending their names to Mars and other extraterrestrial destinations for more than two decades, and that's when: until September 30, NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory will name the name of the Mars 2020 aircraft mission.

All you have to do is type in your name and location in an online form on the NASA website and press the "Send" button. You'll instantly have the option to print or save a souvenir boarding pass listing over 300 million miles of loyalty points for falsified travelers.

Once all the names have been collected, they will be handed over to the JPL microdevice lab to be etched on a silicon chip with an electron beam. Each line of text will have a width of only 75 nanometers, which corresponds to less than one thousandth of the thickness of a human hair.

It's small enough that over a million names are written on a microchip the size of a tenth. But even at this rate, it will probably take more than one chip to get the job done. After all, more than 2.4 million names were etched on two chips sent to Mars on NASA's InSight lander last year.

The March 2020 rover will be an even bigger market, thanks to its role in NASA's accelerated campaign to look for evidence of ancient life on Mars.

"We want everyone to participate in this exploration trip," Thomas Zurbuchen, Associate Administrator of the NASA Science Mission Directorate in Washington, said in a press release. "This is an exciting time for NASA as we embark on this journey to answer deep questions about our neighboring planet, and even about the origins of life itself."

The rover the size of a car, with a capacity of 2,300 pounds, should be taken off in mid-2020, with a landing on the red planet scheduled for February 2021. The main mission of the rover to Jezero Crater will consist of exploring what is thought to be the site of a delta river at the edge of a giant impact pond. The rocks and soil of the crater may contain organic molecules and other traces of microbial life.

"The delta is a good place to lay evidence of life, and then conserve it for billions of years since the lake's presence," said Ken Farley, Mars 2020 Project Scientist, in November last, when NASA revealed the location of the vehicle. Go.

The plutonium mobile will collect samples to save them, with the aim of finding a way to return them for a next round trip to Mars. NASA also plans to pack a mini-helicopter into the rover, as well as an experiment to produce oxygen from Mars's thin atmosphere of carbon dioxide.

Such technology could be useful when astronauts move to the red planet, perhaps as early as the 2030s. And who knows? In decades, if not centuries, interplanetary explorers may well be able to recover the chips bearing the name of the frame of the rover Mars 2020. Hopefully they will bring their microscopes.