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Visions of Mars Landing May 25.
  

Space Topics

Name the Rovers


In 2003 The Planetary Society joined with the LEGO company to run a naming contest for the Mars Exploration Rovers, until then known only as MER-A and MER-B. The Planetary Society convened a judging panel that whittled the approximately 10,000 entries down to 33, from which NASA chose the winning student and her entry: Sofi Collis, a 9-year-old, 3rd-grade student from Arizona. In her essay, she submitted "Spirit" and "Opportunity" as her suggested names for the two rovers.

The Name the Rovers contest was open for K-12 American students. Essays justifying the name selections ranged in length from 50 words to 500 words depending on the grade level.

The judges were:

Andre Bormanis, Star Trek writer and science consultant
David Brin, science fiction author
Glenn Cunningham, former Mars Global Surveyor and Mars Observer Project Manager
M. Darby Dyar, Associate Professor of Astronomy, Mount Holyoke College
Matt Golombek, JPL, Co-chair of the landing site selection for Mars Exploration Rover, Project Scientist for Mars Pathfinder
Joe Oliver, Los Angeles Unified School District
Barbara Scott, Los Angeles Unified School District science teacher
Donna Shirley, Asst. Dean of Engineering, U. of Oklahoma, former JPL
Steve Williams, National Air and Space Museum, Smithsonian Institution

Read the winning essays »