Mars 2020 Fun Facts
Hitching a Ride
“Ingenuity” Robotic Helicopter
The car-size Perseverance rover, named “Percy,” brought along the small, autonomous aircraft (weighs less than 4 pounds) for the first test of powered flight on another planet.
Sounds of Mars
Percy is carrying a pair of microphones to provide interesting and historic audio of the arrival and landing at Mars.
Send Your Name to Mars
Percy has three fingernail-sized chips on board containing 10,932,295 names. These names include alumna Lauren DuCharme, her husband, Daniel Tchui ’13 (B.S. mechanical engineering), and her parents, Kelly and James DuCharme.
Percy’s New Home on the Red Planet
-81°FAverage Temperature
24 hours 37 minutesLength of Day
687 days
almost twice as long as a year on EarthLength of Year
on Earth
on Mars
Navajo Names
Percy’s team, in collaboration with the Navajo Nation Office of the President and Vice President, is naming features of scientific interest with words in the Navajo language. The first is a rock named “Máaz” — the Navajo word for “Mars.”
Source: NASA/JPL-Caltech
