NASA invites the public to send their name to Mars

NASA is giving interested parties the chance to send their names to Mars on board the Mars 2020 rover, which will be launched next year. The names are etched on a chip. Everyone who participates in the project will receive a boarding pass to Mars as a souvenir.

You can participate in the project until September 30, 2019. All you have to do is leave a name, country and e-mail address on this NASA page. At the time of writing, more than 273,500 interested parties have already entered their data. Participants will not only receive a digital boarding pass for the mission, but also frequent flyer points.

It is not the first time that people can send their name with a mission of the American space agency. On NASA’s InSight mission to the red planet, launched in May 2018, the names of more than two million people were shot into space. Each participant thus collected almost five hundred million frequent flyer kilometers. In 2008 there was the Send Your Name to The Moon project, where the names were sent along with the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter.

The Mars 2020 rover launch is scheduled for July 2020; landing on the red planet is scheduled for February 2021. The new rover, weighing about 1,000 kilograms, will search for any traces of past microbial life, and will collect information about the climate and geology of Mars. The rover will also collect soil samples and take them back to Earth.

The Microdevices Laboratory of NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory will use an electron beam to put names of participants on a silicon chip. The text lines are narrower than 75 nanometers, or one thousandth of the width of a human hair. As a result, more than a million names have to fit on the chip.