A placard commemorating NASA’s “Send Your Name to Mars” campaign was installed on the Perseverance Mars rover on March 16, 2020, at NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida. Three fingernail-sized chips affixed to the upper-left corner of the placard feature the names of 10,932,295 people who participated, including mine! They were individually stenciled onto the chips by electron beam, along with the essays of the 155 finalists in NASA’s “Name the Rover” contest.

Perseverance, nicknamed Percy, is a car-sized Mars rover designed to explore the Jezero crater on Mars as part of NASA’s Mars 2020 mission. It was manufactured by the Jet Propulsion Laboratory and launched on July 30, 2020, at 11:50 UTC aboard a United Launch Alliance Atlas V 541 rocket. Confirmation that the rover successfully landed on Mars was received on February 18, 2021, at 20:55 UTC. 

To learn more about the Mars 2020 mission and the Perseverance rover, visit the NASA site HERE.

To register your name for future Mars missions, visit the NASA site HERE.