Out of this world!

This last Thursday, NASA's latest Mars Rover, Perseverance, safely touched down in Jezero crater on the red planet, following a six-month journey from Earth. Launched back in July 2020, this latest robot emissary carries a plethora of scientific instruments, some of which will be crucial to determine the next steps in humanity's effort to set foot on, and ultimately colonise that frigid, arid world. Personally speaking, it is embarassing that at the beginning of the third decade of the 21st century, we're still only sending robots to Mars and haven't managed a manned expedition yet, but that is beside the point. More to the point, Perseverance's fiery arrival and landing were watched live by millions of people all over the planet. Well, as live as the 20 minute light delay between Mars and Earth will allow. I was one of these millions, as the landing provided a much-needed break from the ongoing lockdown drudgery on Earth. However, I also had a more immediate reason to watch the landing, a much more personal one.

You see, amongst the numerous scientific payloads carried by Perseverance are also three small chips, engraved with over ten million names. These are the names of everyday people who had signed up to have their names carried to the red planet. As you might have guessed, my name is among those engraved on these chips, as are the names of my late parents. Having missed the chance to sign them up for the 2018 launch of Mars Insight, it just seemed like the right thing to do in order to give them at least a semi-permanent memorial beyond their headstones. As you can see, I had a very personal reason to watch the landing, hoping all the while that Perseverance wouldn't end up like a smoking impact crater somewhere in Jezero.

Looking back at that landing now, a few days after the fact, the sheer audacity of the entire thing is all but impossible to ignore. Not just the mission as such, even though depositing a two-metre-long rover weighing in at just under a ton on Mars is no mean feat by any standard. I'm referring to the fact that everyday people like me can simply have their names transported to another world with only a few clicks. I'm old enough to remember a time when spaceflight in general was something distant, something that people got to weatch from afar, especially if you happened to live in Europe, which doesn't really have that many launch sites for space missions. And yet seemingly overnight, all of this changed in the early 2010s. 

For NASA, this is actually an ingenious solution to drum up publicity for their missions. All they need is a website and a few hundred grams of spare mass on a mission they're working on. Whether they're saving names in electronic form or engraving them in microscopic form on a chip, the NASA site or contractor tasked with assembling and integrating the spacecraft will likely have the machinery on-site already and will therefore only have to allocate a bit of time to have the chip engraved or the names saved on it. For us average joes, knowing that your name is somewhere out there, whether that was just a short hop into Earth orbit, being slowly roasted in the Sun's corona, or a full-blown journey to Mars. In a way, it has taken these missions out of the hands of government agencies to a certain degree and opened them up to the general public, in a way that is not much more complex than signing up to Instagram, or maybe Tinder, if you're interested in a different type of rendezvous and docking.

It really is a 21st century method to spark interest in space flight and, at least for me personally, it has re-kindled my interest in space exploration beyond the exploits of SpaceX and other Elon Musk antics. And yes, I do take a certain pride in having "flown" on four missions so far, the first Orion test flight, the Mars Insight lander, the Parker Solar Probe, and finally Perseverance. However, I wish that there was a more "active" role attached to this "participation" in the mission, possibly by linking it to citizen science projects such as SETI @Home. With a return to the Moon on the horizon, construction on Lunar Gateway Station due to start in the coming years, and preparations for a Mars Sample Return mission well underway, there is a lot of room for additional participation, so keep your eyes peeled. But just to be sure, the window seat on the next mission is mine!