Cape Canaveral, Florida – The next explorer of the POT, a six-wheeled robotic vehicle that will take off mid-year to collect samples from Mars and then return to Earth, finally has a name: Perseverance.
The name was suggested by Alex Mather, a seventh grade boy from Virginia, as part of a contest for US students. The US space agency announced it Thursday at Mather’s school in Burke, Virginia, and he was able to read his winning essay on a live broadcast from NASA’s television.
“We are a kind of explorers and we will encounter many obstacles on the way to Mars. However, we can persevere,” the boy wrote. “We, not as a nation, but as human beings, will not give up. The human race will always persevere towards the future.”
Thomas Zurbuchen, deputy administrator for scientific missions at NASA, said the agency’s Curiosity explorer has been roaming around Mars since 2012, when Alex and his companions were babies or very young children.
“Perseverance and curiosity together are what exploration is about,” he said.
Nearly 4,700 volunteer judges had reduced a set of 28,000 proposals to 155 semifinalists. Once there were nine finalists, the public was invited to vote online.
Mather and her family won a trip to Cape Canaveral, in Florida, to see the launch of the Perseverance. The boy fell in love with space at age 11 when he attended a space camp in Huntsville, Alabama. That’s when the video games went to the background. He said he wants to be an engineer and work at NASA.
The explorer is in his final preparations at the Kennedy Space Center of the agency. The name plate will be placed on the robotic arm and will protect it from rocks.
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