This year is expected to be another great year for space exploration with NASA sending a new rover to the Martian surface.?Just like Curiosity, this rover is also supposed to have a name, but this time NASA decided to do things a little bit differently.?
It put this responsibility at the hands of kids, who suggested what should the new rover be named and why. People around the world then voted online for the best name according to them and now we have a winner: Perseverance.
The child who came up with the winning name was Alex Mather, a middle school student from Fairfax County, Virginia. At the live broadcasted event, he was honoured onstage by NASA admins as well as his school district's superintendent and school board members.
Perseverance is scheduled to blast off to the Red Planet this July where it look for soil and rock cores which will be later retrieval and brought back to study here on Earth.
The rover is loaded with a plethora of equipment and sensors that will constantly provide data about the red planet. The rover has a total of 23 cameras, two microphones that allow capture of Martian winds. The rover also has lasers onboard for chemical analysis of the lunar surface.
The rover is as big as a family car and has six wheels similar to its predecessor Curiosity that will help it to move along the tricky rocky terrain with ease.
Powering the rover is a tiny nuclear reactor with two-metre-long articulated arms and a drill to break rocks and collect samples of life.
After the rover collects the samples, they will be sealed by the rover in tubes, which will then be discarded on the Martian surface for a future mission to collect them and get them to Earth.