NASA opens window to send names on future Mars mission, over 11 mn registrations so far

As NASA’s Perseverance Mars Rover is set to fly for the red planet, the space agency has opened the reservations to send names for future Mars mission. The official Twitter handle of NASA’s Perseverance Mars Rover shared a link to obtain a boarding pass for people who want to send their name to Mars on US space agency's next flight to the uninhabited planet.

People can click on the link shared by NASA and enter their name along with postal code and email id. A boarding pass will be generated which shows Cape Canaveral Air Force Station, Florida as the launch site and Jezero Crater, Mars as arrival site, with a scheduled departure in July 2026. Over 11 million people have registered for it so far and the number continues to increase.

Meanwhile, the countdown for Perseverance Mars Rover has started and will lift off from NASA’s Kennedy Space Center at 5.20pm IST on July 30. The Perseverance rover, built at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Southern California, is loaded with scientific instruments, advanced computational capabilities for landing and other new systems. 

Mars orbiters have been collecting images and data from Jezero Crater from about 322 kilometres above, but Perseverance will help understand Mars’ past climate conditions. It will also read the geological history embedded in its rocks, giving scientists a richer sense of what the planet was like in its distant past. 

Read: NASA's Mars 2020 Rover Perseverance Is 'go' For Launch On July 30

Study of geology and climate

The study of the Red Planet’s geology and climate could also give a sense of why Earth and Mars, which formed from the same primordial stuff, ended up so different. Perseverance will be the first rover to bring a sample caching system to Mars that will package promising samples for return to Earth by a future mission. 

Perseverance’s drill will cut intact rock cores that are about the size of a piece of chalk and will place them in sample tubes that it will store until the rover reaches an appropriate drop-off location. It will also carry a technology demonstration called MOXIE (Mars Oxygen In-Situ Resource Utilization Experiment) which will produce oxygen from Mars’ carbon dioxide atmosphere, demonstrating a way that future explorers might produce oxygen for rocket propellant as well as for breathing.

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