Alex Mather beat out 28,000 other kids from across the U.S. in naming the Mars rover, which is set to land Thursday. News4’s Derrick Ward talked with him.
Credit: NASA
Over its mission time of one Mars year (which translates to about 687 Earth days), the Perseverance NASA s ninth mission to land on Mars will collect rock and soil samples in the hopes of finding evidence of ancient life on Earth s closest neighboring planet. To quote Carl Sagan, Gentry Lee, of NASA s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, said in a statement, If we see a hedgehog staring in the camera, we would know there s current and certainly ancient life on Mars, but based on our past experiences, such an event is extremely unlikely. Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence, and the discovery that life existed elsewhere in the universe would certainly be extraordinary.