I checked several days ago, March 4th, and no winner had been announced by NASA on who won naming the Mars Rover. When I checked last night, they announced a winner on March 5th – Virginia Middle School Student Earns Honor of Naming NASA’s Next Mars Rover: https://www.nasa.gov/press-release/virginia-middle-school-student-earns-honor-of-naming-nasas-next-mars-rover. Thought it would make a good Space Saturdays post for this week. A lot more information in the link above as I was trying to keep this post in the 500 – 600 word range.
March 5, 2020RELEASE 20-021NASA’s next Mars rover has a new name – Perseverance.
The name was announced Thursday by Thomas Zurbuchen, associate administrator of the Science Mission Directorate, during a celebration at Lake Braddock Secondary School in Burke, Virginia. Zurbuchen was at the school to congratulate seventh grader Alexander Mather, who submitted the winning entry to the agency’s “Name the Rover” essay contest, which received 28,000 entries from K-12 students from every U.S. state and territory.
“Alex’s entry captured the spirit of exploration,” said Zurbuchen. “Like every exploration mission before, our rover is going to face challenges, and it’s going to make amazing discoveries. It’s already surmounted many obstacles to get us to the point where we are today – processing for launch. Alex and his classmates are the Artemis Generation, and they’re going to be taking the next steps into space that lead to Mars. That inspiring work will always require perseverance. We can’t wait to see that nameplate on Mars.”
Perseverance is the latest in a long line of Red Planet rovers to be named by school-age children, from Sojourner in 1997 to the Spirit and Opportunity rovers, which landed on Mars in 2004, to Curiosity, which has been exploring Mars since 2012. In each case, the name was selected following a nationwide contest.
The contest that resulted in Alex’s winning entry of Perseverance began Aug. 28, 2019. Nearly 4,700 volunteer judges – educators, professionals and space enthusiasts from around the country – reviewed submissions to help narrow the pool down to 155 semifinalists. Once that group was whittled down to nine finalists, the public had five days to weigh in on their favorites, logging more than 770,000 votes online, with the results submitted to NASA for consideration. The nine finalists also talked with a panel of experts, including Lori Glaze, director of NASA’s Planetary Science Division; NASA astronaut Jessica Watkins; rover driver Nick Wiltsie at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) in Pasadena, California; and Clara Ma, who, as a sixth grade student in 2009, named Curiosity.
–snip-
Mars 2020 is part of a larger program that includes missions to the Moon as a way to prepare for human exploration of the Red Planet. Charged with landing the first woman and the next man on the Moon by 2024, NASA will establish a sustained human presence on and around the Moon by 2028 through NASA’s Artemis program.
For more information about the mission, go to:
https://mars.nasa.gov/mars2020/
Follow the Perseverance Mars rover’s official accounts and get answers to your questions about the mission at:
https://twitter.com/NASAPersevere
and:
https://facebook.com/NASAPersevere
For more about NASA’s Moon to Mars plans, visit:
https://www.nasa.gov/topics/moon-to-mars
-end-
Grey Hautaluoma / Alana Johnson
Headquarters, Washington
202-358-0668 / 202-358-1501
grey.hautaluoma-1@nasa.gov / alana.r.johnson@nasa.govDC Agle
Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, Calif.
818-393-9011
david.c.agle@jpl.nasa.govLast Updated: March 5, 2020Editor: Sean Potter
Previous Space Saturdays: https://upsdownsfamilyhistory.wordpress.com/tag/space-saturdays/
That’s so cool! The kid must be so happy!
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The kid gets to be involved in helping to pick the next named project. I liked how it wasn’t only a survey. That was part of the equation, but they had other parts they took into account.
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=)
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