NASA’s Mars 2020 Rover Is About to Get a New Name - The New York Times

The next NASA rover headed to Mars, up to now blandly referred to as Mars 2020, is to receive its proper name on Thursday.

The selection of the winning moniker is the culmination of NASA’s “Name the Rover” essay contest, which began last summer. Volunteer judges sifted through 28,000 entries from children ranging from kindergartners to high schoolers and selected 155 semifinalists.

In January, NASA announced the final nine: Clarity, Courage, Endurance, Fortitude, Ingenuity, Perseverance, Promise, Tenacity and Vision.

The Mars 2020 rover, which was built at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif., is now at the Kennedy Space Center in Florida for final preparations before it launches to space in July. It is scheduled to land on Mars on Feb. 18, 2021.

NASA has previously landed four rovers on Mars successfully. No other country has accomplished that feat — or even tried — although the Soviet Union and China have landed wheeled vehicles on the moon.

The names of most NASA spacecraft are not chosen in essay contests.

In its early years, NASA bestowed simple names: a broad-sounding noun plus a number. The seven landers to survey the surface of the moon between 1966 and 1968 in preparation for the landings of Apollo astronauts were, sequentially, Surveyor 1 through Surveyor 7. The probes that flew past Mars, Venus and Mercury were Mariner 1 through Mariner 10. Viking 1 and Viking 2 were the two landers that NASA set down on Mars in 1976.

As NASA sent more spacecraft to Mars, their names became more descriptive, like Mars Global Surveyor and Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter.

Some names are abbreviations (at times rather tortured manipulations of words and letters). MAVEN is Mars Atmosphere and Volatile Evolution. InSight, the NASA lander that set down on Mars in November 2018, is a shortening of Interior Exploration using Seismic Investigations, Geodesy and Heat Transport.

But for the wheeled Martian explorers, beginning with the microwave oven-size rover on the Pathfinder mission in 1997, NASA has turned to schoolchildren. For Pathfinder, NASA liked the suggestion of Valerie Ambroise, who proposed naming it Sojourner, after Sojourner Truth, a former slave who took to the road to preach emancipation and women’s rights.

A few years later, NASA was working to send two larger rovers that were the size of golf carts. These were the Mars Exploration Rovers, and NASA referred to the two as MER-1 and MER-2. Confusingly, MER-1 was also sometimes called MER-B, and MER-2 was also MER-A.

MER-1 and MER-2 were the hardware designations to differentiate the two rovers, while MER-A and MER-B referred to the mission designations. MER-A was the first launch, and MER-B was the second.

When devising the designations, NASA did not set in stone which rover would be on which rocket.

“There was flexibility in our plans, and the rovers were identical, so it could have gone either way,” said Steven W. Squires, the principal investigator for the two rovers. “As it turned out, MER-2 was ready to go first, and so became MER-A.”

Thankfully, a contest in 2003 provided the lasting names of Spirit (previously MER-2) and Opportunity (MER-1), the choices of Sofi Collis, then 9 years old, who was born in Siberia.

“I used to live in an orphanage,” she wrote in her essay. “It was dark and cold and lonely. At night, I looked up at the sparkly sky and felt better. I dreamed I could fly there. In America, I can make all my dreams come true. Thank you for the ‘Spirit’ and the ‘Opportunity.’”

Spirit’s mission ended in 2010 after it became trapped in sand. Opportunity’s concluded last year following a dust storm that caused it to lose power.

The next NASA rover, the size of a car, was Mars Science Laboratory. Clara Ma, a sixth-grader from Kansas, named it Curiosity. It continues to study Gale Crater.

Mars 2020 is an almost twin of Curiosity, which simplified the building of the spacecraft. But it carries a different set of instruments with somewhat different goals.

While Curiosity has found convincing evidence that there was, at least a few billion years ago, water on the surface of Mars for extended periods of time, Mars 2020 will make a more careful search for molecules considered to be the building blocks of life.

Jezero Crater, the destination of Mars 2020, contains sediments of an ancient river delta, a location where evidence of past life could be preserved if it ever existed on Mars.

The Mars 2020 rover will gather Martian soil and rock samples which are to be collected and return to Earth by a future NASA mission.

As a demonstration of novel technology, Mars 2020 is also carrying a small helicopter that will fly short distances from the rover.

Just as Sojourner demonstrated the advantages of a spacecraft that drives, a successful test of the helicopter could lead to more flying probes on other planets.

NASA is already planning to send a plutonium-powered quadcopter to Titan, a moon of Saturn. The name of that mission, Dragonfly, is not an abbreviation.