With Orion’s First Flight, Send Your Name on NASA’s Journey to Mars

Over 1.38 million people flew on the silicon chip aboard the maiden flight of Orion, the NASA capsule that will eventually transport humans to the Red Planet in the 2030s.

Submissions, available on NASA website, will be accepted till September 8.

Here is your chance: Nasa will engrave your name on to a microchip and take it on board its spacecraft InSight to Mars in March next year.

According to reports, “Send your name on InSight” contest has been launched by NASA. From India there are now 8473 people, who have submitted their names for the mission, as revealed by website.

“By participating in this opportunity to send your name aboard InSight to the Red Planet, you’re showing that you’re part of that journey and the future of space exploration”, said Jim Green, director of planetary science at NASA Headquarters in Washington. But the fact that we can’t be on Mars, doesn’t mean our names can’t be.

Sending your name to Mars may mean nothing, or it may mean something.

Nasa said this mission was the first dedicated to the investigation of the deep interior of the planet. Its objective is to elucidate the nature of the Martian core, measure heat flow and sense for “Marsquakes”.

InSight is designed to peer into Mars’ interior, learning more about the composition of the planet to help researchers on Earth find out more about how the rocky planets of the solar system formed, NASA said. A self-hammering probe will be deployed to examine the the geology below the planet’s surface.

It’s scheduled to launch in March of next year and arrive in September of 2016.

In order to reflect an individual’s personal participation in NASA’s journey to Mars, the fly-your-name opportunity also does comes with “frequent flier” points, which will span multiple decades and multiple missions.

It is funded by NASA’s Discovery Program as well as several European national space agency’s and countries.