NASA's "Send Your Name to Mars" campaign invited people around the world to submit their names to ride aboard the agency's next rover to the Red Planet. Some 10,932,295 people did just that. The names were stenciled by electron beam onto three fingernail-sized silicon chips, along with the essays of the 155 finalists in NASA's "Name the Rover" contest. The chips were then were attached to an aluminum plate on NASA's Perseverance Mars rover at Kennedy Space Center in Florida on March 16. Scheduled to launch this summer, Perseverance will land at Jezero Crater on Feb. 18, 2021.
The car-size Perseverance, which is scheduled to launch to the Red Planet this July, carries a special commemorative plate that holds small silicon chips bearing the names of more than 10.9 million people who participated in NASA's "Send Your Name to Mars" campaign. That plate also features a diagram of Earth, Mars and the sun, whose rays are not nearly as random as they look. Indeed, the sunbeams on this plate actually spell out "Explore as One" in Morse code, mission team members revealed via Twitter on Monday (March 30).
Credits:
https://www.space.com/nasa-perseverance-mars-rover-morse-code-hidden-message.html
No comments:
Post a Comment