NASA has announced the name of its next Mars rover (previously known as the Mars Science Laboratory), which is scheduled to launch in 2011. The name, suggested by 12-year-old Clara Ma (a student at Sunflower Elementary School in Lenexa, Kansas), is “Curiosity”. For suggesting the winning name, Ma has won a trip to NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California, where Curiosity is being built, and where she’ll have the opportunity to sign the craft.
The name was chosen from more than 9,000 suggestions in a student essay contest, followed by a public vote (see this article).
Announcing the name, Mars Science Laboratory Program Executive Mark Dahl said “Students from every state suggested names for this rover. That’s testimony to the excitement Mars missions spark in our next
generation of explorers. Many of the nominating essays were excellent and several of the names would have fit well. I am especially pleased with the choice, which recognizes something universally human and essential to science.”
Ma said she entered the contest after hearing about it at school. “I was really interested in space, but I thought space was something I could only read about in books and look at during the night from so far away. I thought that I would never be able to get close to it, so for me, naming the Mars rover would at least be one step closer.”
In her winning essay, she wrote “Curiosity is an everlasting flame that burns in everyone’s mind. It makes me get out of bed in the morning and wonder what surprises life will throw at me that day. Curiosity is such a powerful force. Without it, we wouldn’t be who we are today. Curiosity is the passion that drives us through our everyday lives. We have become explorers and scientists with our need to ask questions and to wonder.”
Curiosity will be the largest, most capable craft sent to land on Mars. It will check to see whether the environment in a selected landing region ever has been favorable for supporting microbial life and preserving evidence of life. The rover also will search for minerals that formed in the presence of water and look for several chemical building blocks of life.
In addition to Ma’s physical signature, NASA is offering everyone else the opportunity to send electronic signatures on a microchip. To “sign” the chip yourself, see this page. At press time, the chip contains more than 140,000 names from around the world: 37,000 from the US; 34,000 from Brazil; 12,000 from Canada; 9,000 from Norway.…