Meet The Teen Who Named NASA’s Mars Rover

“And the name of this mission is… Perseverance.”

Perseverance is the latest in a long line of NASA Mars rovers to be named by schoolchildren – from Sojourner rover that landed in 1997, to Curiosity, which has been exploring the Red Planet since 2012.

“I went through just a lot of stories from people who were working on the mission,” says latest winner, 13-year-old Alex Mather from Springfield, Virginia. “One of the major things that I learned was that Mars missions are very hard, but they’re also very rewarding, and it takes a lot of perseverance and effort from a lot of the people on the team to make these missions happen. So, I realized that perseverance is not only just an important part of the mission, but an important part of humans. And I decided that that was the best name for the mission.”

Mather fell in love with space while attending Space Camp.

“As you’re driving down the road, you can slowly see the spire of the rocket rise above the building, and eleven-year-old me saw that and lost his mind. I immediately knew that space was something I was doing for the rest of my life.”

Perseverance is NASA’s most ambitious Mars mission totaling around $3 billion.

“It’s being sent to a Jezero Crater,” says Mather, “which was once a river delta. So if there’s fossils of any sort or any evidence of ancient life, it would probably be there. And this rover is kind of there to answer, was there ever life on Mars?”

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