Filipinos Dominate Submissions For NASA’s ‘Send Your Name to Mars’ Program

July 31, 2020

The number of Filipinos wanting to “travel” to Mars has just breached the million mark.

Send me: The Philippines has topped the countries with the most number of signups for the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA)’s “Send Your Name to Mars” program.

The “Send Your Name to Mars” program is NASA’s second invitation to have participants “fly” their names in its future missions to the Red Planet.
As of this writing, NASA has received over 1.7 million submissions from the Philippines, exceeding the rest of the submissions combined which is now at over 1 million.
The total name reservations received by NASA so far has reached over 2.6 million.
The United States comes in second with over 151,000 reservations, India follows closely with more than 136,000.
On social media, users shared their opinion on why so many Filipinos participated in the program.
One user speculated that this could be a sign of growing discontent with the way “things are run” in the Philippines. Another pointed out that it just reveals the Filipinos’ love for social media.

First-class flight: NASA launched a car-sized rover named Perseverance and a robotic helicopter named Ingenuity to Mars on Thursday, carrying with it the names of 10,932,295 people who participated in the first “Send Your Name to Mars” campaign.

Names of the participants were stenciled by an electron beam to three fingernail-sized silicon chips, along with the essays of the 155 finalists in NASA’s “Name the Rover” contest.
The chips were then attached to an aluminum plate on NASA’s Perseverance Mars rover at Kennedy Space Center in Florida back in March.
The Mars 2020 mission is aimed to look for signs of past microbial life and examine the Martian climate and geology in the area known as Jezero crater.
The current mission is set to land its robotic explorers on Mars on February 18, 2021, after six and a half months of travel time.
Shortly after landing, the Ingenuity helicopter will be deployed, becoming the first aircraft to fly on another planet.

Those who want to include their names on the next Mars mission slated for July 2026 can sign up here.

Feature Image via NASA/JPL-Caltech

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