Pasadena, California: The Jet Propulsion Laboratory of the California Institute of Technology informs that the opportunity opened on May 21 to submit names to be sent to Mars, to share in this journey of exploration will close on Sep 30.
Persons can send their names to Mars aboard NASA’s Mars 2020 rover by logging in at the NASA website until Sept. 30, 2019. Names received by that date (and over 9.4 million names have been received so far), will be stencilled on a chip that will be affixed to the Mars 2020 Rover.
The Rover expected to launch as early as July 2020 will land on the Red Planet about February 2021. This will be mankind’s first round trip to another planet. Each registrant will receive a digital souvenir at the time of application.
Received names will be stencilled onto a silicon chip using an electron beam, with individual lines of text smaller than one-thousandth the width of a human hair. The chip will ride on the rover under a glass cover.