The Mars 2020 Rover is preparing for its two-year voyage to Mars in July 2020, and in the meantime, NASA has announced that your name can travel along with it to the Red Planet.

Named Mars 2020, the upcoming rover will hunt for signs of habitable environments on Mars while searching for signs of hosting alien life in the past. The robotic traveler will also hoard a series of samples that can be returned to Earth with a future mission. The rover will spend at least a Martian year gathering data and collecting relevant samples for future study.

Meanwhile, NASA has provided the public with an opportunity to let their names travel to Mars along with the rover. An electron beam will be employed to etch the names onto a dime-sized silicon chip, where one name will be approximately one-thousandth the width of a human hair. This will provide room for several million names to be part of the small chip. The following link will direct you to NASA’s website, wherein you will enter your name, country, postal code, and email address. This will fetch you the boarding pass to Mars, which can be downloaded/printed. The process to sign up for the mission can be accomplished anytime before September 30.

https://go.nasa.gov/Mars2020Pass

The mission is currently scheduled to take off from Florida’s Cape Carnival in July 2020, when Earth and Mars are positioned to require the least amount of power for interplanetary travel. The rover is expected to land in February 2021, with an initial mission duration of at least one Martian year (687 Earth days).