NASA Invites Everyone To Get Their Boarding Pass To Mars

Fancy hitting up Mars? Well, the thing is, that is closer to pipe dream. The truth is, it will be a long while before any human will be setting foot on the Red Planet. However, not all hope is lost. NASA is giving you a chance to live that dream, spiritedly speaking. Running up to the next Mars mission that will put another rover onto Mars in July 2020, NASA is running a campaign to “invite” everyone and anyone to send your name along for the ride to Mars.

What’s going to happen is, your name along with millions others will be stenciled using electron beam on dime-sized silicon chips. Here’s what’s up with the name sending process:

“The Microdevices Laboratory at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) in Pasadena, California, will use an electron beam to stencil the submitted names onto a silicon chip with lines of text smaller than one-thousandth the width of a human hair (75 nanometers). At that size, more than a million names can be written on a single dime-size chip. The chip (or chips) will ride on the rover under a glass cover.”

As a souvenir for sending your name to Mars, you will be getting a digital boarding pass, as well as awarded with “frequent flyer” points more than any real life flying could earn you (about 300 million miles in this case). Now, here’s what really going to get geeks all psyched up: not only miles are awarded for each “flight.” You will be able to down the corresponding digital mission patches too, just a show so you can show off you have “flew” on a mission to Mars. You have until September 30 to submit your name to the list and obtain the digital board pass.

Images: NASA.

Source: Engadget.