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Sixth-Grader Names Next Mars Rover

by Chad Mumm on May 28, 2009 at 06:22 PM


"Hey, Mom and Dad, guess what I did today? I named NASA's newest Mars rover. Let's get ice cream."

We're guessing that's the conversation 12-year-old Clara Ma had with her parents after the sixth-grade student from Sunflower Elementary School in Lenexa, Kansas won a nationwide contest to name the next Martian rover. Her contest-winning appellation? Curiosity.

NASA has a history of naming its devices by public polling; indeed, back in the mid-'70s, the first space shuttle -- initially called 'Constitution' -- was named 'Enterprise' after Captain Kirk's fictional ship from 'Star Trek,' following a large write-in contest. More recently, the space agency was forced to exercise its seldom-used editorial powers when thousands of people voted to name the newest module of the International Space Station the 'Colbert' for comedian and talk-show host Stephen Colbert, who had urged his viewers to write his name onto the ballot. [From: FOX News]

The 5 Greatest Planet-Exploring Robots

    If its mission succeeds in 2012, NASA's latest Mars rover, the newly christened Curiosity will join an elite group of robots that have managed to touch down safely on an alien world. Click through to see Curiosity's five greatest forbearers.

    Luna 9
    Two and a half years before Neil Armstrong's giant leap, the Soviets' unmanned Luna 9 probe touched down on the surface of the Moon on February 3, 1966. For three days, it beamed back the first videos and panoramic photos from a heavenly body.

    Venera 7
    On August 17, 1970, the Soviet Venera 7 probe crash-landed on Venus and became the first spacecraft to survey our nearest planetary neighbor. What it found wasn't pretty: A hellish world with metal-melting temperatures of 475 degrees Fahrenheit and crushing atmospheric pressure 93 times greater than Earth's.

    Viking 1 and 2
    After three attempts by the USSR, NASA succeeded in landing the first robot on Mars when Viking 1 touched down on July 20, 1976. (Its sibling, Viking 2, landed on September 3.) Although designed for a 90-day mission, the landers spent over 6 years surveying the planet.

    NEAR Shoemaker
    On February 14 , 2000, Shoemaker locked into orbit around 433 Eros, an asteroid orbiting just past Mars. Though Shoemaker wasn't designed to land on Eros, NASA engineers successfully plunked it down on the rock after its one-year mission.

    Huygens Saturn Probe
    A joint American-European mission touched-down a probe called Huygens on the surface of Saturn's largest moon, Titan, on January 14, 2005. Nearly half the size of Earth, Titan is the only moon in the solar system with an atmosphere -- which allowed Huygens to make a leisurely two-and-a-half-hour parachute descent while measuring the atmosphere and snapping photos of the terrain. It continued to send back data for an hour and ten minutes after it landed.

Tags: kids, mars, mars rover, MarsRover, nasa

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