Send Your Name to Mars Aboard NASA's InSight Lander!

Want to send your name to Mars? NASA is offering another chance to do so.

When the InSight lander launches to the Red Planet next year, it will contain the names of members of the public, and you can submit your name for it to be included.

In 2015, the space agency invited people from around the world to add their names to a silicon chip that will be affixed to the InSight Mars lander. With nearly 827,000 individuals already signed up, NASA is now adding a second microchip, giving members of the public another chance to put their names on Mars.

"Mars continues to excite space enthusiasts of all ages," Bruce Banerdt, the InSight mission's principal investigator, of NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California, said in a statement. "This opportunity lets them become a part of the spacecraft that will study the inside of the Red Planet." [NASA Mars InSight Lander Mission Gallery (Images)]


NASA's InSight Mars lander is expected to launch in May 2018 and arrive at the Red Planet in November 2018. The mission, whose name is short for "Interior Exploration using Seismic Investigations, Geodesy and Heat Transport," will study the planet's deep interior to gain a better understanding of the processes that helped shaped rocky planets like Mars and Earth.
Specifically, the lander will use a seismometer to detect "Marsquakes" (earthquakes on Mars) and meteor strikes, using the seismic energy of these phenomena to study material far below the Martian surface for the first time, according to the statement.

People can submit their names to be etched onto the second microchip. In doing so, they will earn "frequent flier" points, which reflect their participation in NASA exploration missions. Participants can also download a "boarding pass" with information about each mission that flies their names.
NASA's Frequent Fliers program spans multiple missions, including the first test mission of the Orion capsule, in December 2014. For that mission, more than 1.38 million people earned points when their names flew aboard the spacecraft, which is designed to help NASA astronauts travel to asteroids, Mars and other deep-space destinations.

NASA frequent fliers will have another opportunity to rack up points in 2018, when Orion and NASA's Space Launch System megarocket launch together for the first time. That uncrewed flight, known as Exploration Mission 1, will send Orion on a seven-day trip around the moon to test out many of the capsule's critical systems.

New submissions to send names aboard NASA's InSight lander will be accepted online through Nov. 1, 2017.