Names on Mars, Hearts here on Earth!

Names on Mars, Hearts here on Earth: You might have been aware of the craze that came up recently that went something along the lines of this – NASA would be sending a new spacecraft into space, to be specific, to Mars, in early mid-2018. Now the public became more excited about this since a very important component of this mission called the InSight mission, is to send a whole bunch of names into Mars. How they did it is for later. As of now, read on to know more details about this planned spacecraft to Mars.

Objective: The main and primary objective of the Mars lander would be to place a single lander on Mars soil. That would be stationary and would serve to study the deep interiors of Mars and its cores, extensively, so that it would be able to conduct researches and get to know more about the formation of the rocky planets of the solar system, including our earth. This would be huges step taken in the right direction and would uncover many secrets of our solar system.

Launch: The InSight spacecraft is scheduled to launch any date starting from the 5th of May 2018 to the 8th of June 2018. The carrying rocket will be an Atlas V 401 and will take off from Vandenberg Air Force Base in California in the US. Interestingly this mission will be the first ever interplanetary space flight mission to be launched from California.

Name chips: As you might have guessed, perhaps the main star attraction of the show is the Name chips aboard the InSight spacecraft. The chips are made of silicon and are roughly about eight square millimeters in area. The program called the “Send your name to Mars” was initiated in 2017 and as of 28th January, 2018, the chips were placed on the deck of the spacecraft. The chips have roughly one point six million names on them and each of them are written super finely with the width of a line exceeding no more than a thousandth of the width of a human hair.

The InSight spacecraft is perhaps one of the most widely popular spacecrafts of all time, and more so because of its wide popularity since NASA started taking in names of people from all around the world. The names will be on Mars, but the hearts of all those people down here on earth will be beating, fast! Kudos to NASA and InSight for this initiative.