NASA is inviting people to send their names to the surface of the moon aboard the agency’s first robotic lunar rover, which is being managed from the space agency’s Ames Research Center in Silicon Valley.
The rover named VIPER — short for Volatiles Investigating Polar Exploration Rover — will embark on a mission to the lunar South Pole to unravel the mysteries of the moon’s water and better understand the environment where NASA plans to land the first woman and first person of color under its Artemis program.
“Our VIPER is a game-changer,” said Daniel Andrews, VIPER’s project manager at NASA’s Ames Research Center. “It’s the first mission of its kind, expanding our understanding of where lunar resources could be harvested to support a long-term human presence on the Moon.”
VIPER is part of an initiative by NASA to establish a long-term cadence of moon missions in preparation for sending the first astronauts to Mars.
As part of the “Send Your Name with VIPER” campaign, NASA will accept names received before 8:59 p.m.
Pacific time Friday. The agency will attach them to the rover with a data storage device. To add a name, visit https://www.nasa.gov/send-your-name-with-viper.
Participants can create and download a virtual souvenir — a boarding pass to the VIPER mission featuring their name — to commemorate the experience. People are also encouraged to share their requests on social media using the hashtag #SendYourName.
“With VIPER, we are going to study and explore parts of the Moon’s surface no one has ever been to before,” said Nicola Fox, associate administrator of the Science Mission Directorate at NASA’s headquarters in Washington, D.C.
This campaign is like other NASA projects that have enabled tens of millions of people to send their names to ride along with Artemis I, several Mars spacecraft, and the agency’s upcoming Europa Clipper mission. It draws from the agency’s long tradition of shipping inspirational messages on spacecraft that have explored our solar system and beyond.
I’ve sent my name with previous missions to the moon, Mars and beyond. By now, the extraterrestrials should have my name in their records. Some day, a lttle green man may knock on my door and ask if I’ve been observing them.
now i know this might be hard to believe, but his name is my name as well.
Just take a “baby names” book with you!
@THE OBSERVER….Or they’ll have a recipe named after you in their cookbook “To Serve Man”.
We’ll Make Great Pets https://youtu.be/mFkRvF8MeYM?si=I3e6mS-oRTn0uUWn
What a crock of bs!
The moon already has my name. It’s Venus I’m worried about. But that’s always been true. 💘😎
Why,who will see it?No human has ever been to the moon and no human will make a round trip back to earth,Its suicide.In 1969 when i was 4 i didnt beleive it either.
I kinda wish I could see the world from your perspective. Not permanently, but every now and then just for fun. 😝
When they said – We can’t go back to the moon, because we lost the technology – I expected more people to wake up to the fact that we never went at all.
The computer they said powered the lunar module back to earth wasnt even powerful enough to power a digital wristwatch they discovered,but back then only scientists had computers and nobody knew about computer power but them,The lies caught up with them and Stanely Kubrick is dead now,and died at a time they were really talking about him.
My bad WhenWillTheyLearn, we have a new winner. Dang you guys are a trip! 👊
Ok, let’s have a boomer explain it. Technology has expanded exponentially. Why haven’t we gone back?
Can you answer better than a bumbling Buzz, unburdening himself to a confused school kid? “Because we didn’t go there…” he says.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sGoXn1vMrjE
This just proves how easily misled the ignorant masses were, not to mention still are today.
It always amazes me how each year the latest passes common sense and critical thinking become more and more of a lost art.
Stupidity is more prevalent today than at any other time in history and it will just keep getting worse each generation going forward.
We haven’t gone back because there’s no real reason to send a manned mission to the moon — there’s nothing there, inhabiting the moon would be financially and scientifically impossible at this point. It’s a waste of billions of dollars just to show off at this point. Almost half a MILLION people worked on every aspect of the original mission (including family members of an ex). That’s a lot of people complicit in keeping quiet in life AND death.
@JESSICA…..Good to hear from a educated astrophysicist…now go improve on your sandwich making skills.
Aw crap! I missed it… oh well, when I’m done building my moon rocket my name will be in 10′ tall letters on the side anyway.