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NEWS | November 3, 2017

More Than 2.4 Million Names Are Going to Mars

Engineers at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, California, put the names onto this tiny 0.8 cm-square (8 mm-square) silicon wafer microchip using an electron beam to write extremely tiny letters with lines smaller than one one-thousandth the width of a human hair.

Engineers at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, California, put the names onto this tiny 0.8 cm-square (8 mm-square) silicon wafer microchip using an electron beam to write extremely tiny letters with lines smaller than one one-thousandth the width of a human hair. Full image and caption

Bunny Suits
Last month, NASA invited members of the public to send their names to Mars. And the public responded loud and clear.

More than 1.6 million people signed up to have their names etched on a microchip that will be carried on NASA's upcoming InSight mission, which launches in May of 2018.

NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California, reopened the opportunity after it proved successful in 2015. During that open call, nearly 827,000 names were collected for a microchip that now sits on top of the robotic InSight lander.

Classroom Boarding Pass
Students at Clinton Prairie Elementary School in Frankfort, Indiana, display their “boarding passes” for Mars. Their names are among the 2.4 million that will ride aboard NASA’s InSight lander, bound for the Red Planet in 2018.
Thomas Zurbuchen boarding pass
The grand total once a second microchip is added in early 2018 will be 2,429,807 names. Space enthusiasts who signed up this last round shared their downloadable "boarding passes" on social media, complete with the total number of flight miles they've collected by participating in engagement initiatives for other Mars missions.

William Shatner Boarding Pass
InSight will be the first mission to look deep beneath the Martian surface, studying the planet's interior by listening for marsquakes. These quakes travel through geologic material at different speeds and give scientists a glimpse of the composition and structure of the planet's inside. The insights into how Mars formed will help us better understand how other rocky planets are created.

For more information on InSight, visit:
https://nasa.gov/insight

Andrew Good
Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, Calif.
818-393-2433
andrew.c.good@jpl.nasa.gov

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