Meet mid 2020’s, or as most of humanity remembers, the year when the COVID had started.
But, with all that was going at that time, it was not all doom and gloom about the terrible pandemic that literally shook the foundation of our world, or at least what did we know of it back then.
In July 30, 2020, NASA have launched from Cape Canaveral aboard an Atlas 5-type rocket, the Perseverance Rover, the martian module that has traveled the distance from Earth to Mars in about 6 months, covering a distance of approximately 225 million km.
Following in the footsteps of Curiosity Rover, which landed on the martian soil in August 2012, the Perseverance rover’s main mission was to search for signs of ancient life, study the planet’s geology and climate, and collect rock and regolith samples for possible return to Earth by a future mission.
Perseverance also tested technologies intended to support later human exploration, including an experiment that successfully produced oxygen from the thin carbon-dioxide of the martian atmosphere.
However, a very interesting thing which is unknown to most people even to this day, is that the Perseverance Rover was also designed to carry, and once safely landed inside Jezero crater, on February 18, 2021, the names of almost 11 million earthlings from all over the world.
How did it come to this endeavour one might ask? Pretty simple actually…Back in 2020, months before the scheduled launch of the martian rover, NASA instituted a one of a kind and first-ever initiative called “Send your name to Mars” in which the spatial agency invited people around the globe to submit their names to ride along the rover. Those names now sit on the surface of the Red Planet, written on three fingernail-sized chips on board the Perseverance Rover.
Please allow me to skip all the technical details and latest advances in technology that made it all possible, what is important to remember is also the fact that along with those nearly 11 million names, NASA engineers also included the essays of 155 finalists school children in “Name of the Rover” essay contest.
This included the winning essay on Perseverance as well as the essay for Ingenuity Mars Helicopter, nicknamed Ginny, a mini experimental aicraft that accompanied the rover to Mars. This also marked an all time first in the field of aerospace engineering, as the Ingenuity mini-chopper managed to fly successfully in the very thin martian atmosphere.
Last but not least, I am proud to say that my name was among those 11 million choosen to accompany the martian rover, so I can proudly state that regardless of how my life it is here on Earth, one thing will be for sure: my name will live forever onto the red planet and that will be a testament encrypted on a chip, for future generations to witness. I firmly believe that humanity is less than a decade away of sending the first humans to Mars, thus paving the way for future human colonization and projecting our future for the whole of humanity, living on another planet.
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