NASA's "Mars 2020" rover is scheduled to be sent to the Red Planet next year, and now the Space Agency is giving all the people the opportunity to put their names on the spacecraft.
The final chip's image will be put online on the Mars2020 project's homepage on NASA's website at some point in the spring of 2020.
After receiving all the names up to the deadline, NASA sends them to the "Microdevices Laboratory" at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) in Pasadena, California.
There, the scientists print these names using an electron beam on a silicon chip, with a word-size that is thinner than a thousandth of a hair's thickness. With such scale words, you can type more than a million names on a chip with the size of half a thumb of a finger.
However, The probability that more than one chip will be required is high. Last year, 2.4 million names were collected for installation on the surface of a previous Mars rover which sat down on Mars in November 2018.
The Mars 2020 Rover is using the same config as the one on the Mars Science Lab's Curiosity Rover. It is the size of a car, about 10 feet long (excluding the arm), 9 feet wide, and 7 feet high (about 3 meters long, 2.7 meters wide, 2.2 meters high). But weighs 2,314 pounds (1,050 kg) and weighs less than a compact car. The rover has a new, more powerful wheel design, as well as other improvements.
For the first time, the rover carries a drill section for sampling from Martian rocks and soil. The Mars 2020 mission addresses high-priority science goals for Mars exploration, including key questions about the potential for life on Mars.
If you want to enter your name on Mars 2020, the registration deadline is the end of September. Here is the link to the online registration form on NASA's website.
