The names of 2.4 million people are travelling to Mars on InSight
The names of 2.4 million people are travelling to Mars on InSight
An engineer from Lockheed Martin Space, the corporation that constructed the InSight lander for NASA, places one of two silicon microchips on the Mars lander platform in a clean room. The names of 1.6 million people from all over the world have been engraved on an eight by eight millimetre area; these people registered to join the mission organised by NASA and will now take part in the almost 500-million-kilometre journey – and then remain on Mars forever. A second chip contains 800,000 additional names. NASA engineers used an electron beam to engrave them in extremely small font to accommodate the names of all the ‘passengers’. The lines are narrower than one-thousandth the width of a human hair, which themselves only have an average thickness of approximately 0.05 millimetres.
