Photo: NASA
Not that there are enough Earth-made vehicles up on Mars to get them mixed up, but NASA is taking things seriously and has fitted the Perseverance rover with a VIN of sorts. They call it PIN, which stands for Product Identification Number, and news of its existence was released a couple of days ago.
The American space agency has always been in the habit of hiding interesting messages and clues on the hardware it sends out into space (there’s even a word for it, festooning is how NASA calls this). Still, the rover that recently landed on Mars is filled with them.
As you might already know, the rover carried with it the names of 10.9-million people stenciled on a microchip. The same chip also contains 155 essays submitted during the rover’s naming competition. Several inscriptions, the Earth address of Sherlock Holmes inscribed on a coin and, ironically, a piece of Martian meteorite were all transported from Earth to Mars.
Back to the PIN, the 17-digit number is as follows: AONREHMELN1730055. The first three letters (AON) are characters assigned by the Society of Automotive Engineers, while the following three (REH) stand for Rover Electric Helicopter (the last part on account of Ingenuity) and are meant to represent the type of vehicle.
Up next are the letters ME, which stand for location and objective, which would be Mars and Exploration. Then comes L, another character coming from the Society of Automotive Engineers, and N, which supposedly stands for the year 2022, when the rover is expected to meet its primary objective (study rocks).
Ending the string of characters are a bunch of numbers: 1 means NASA, 7 represent the number of instruments on the rover, 3 is the planet of origin (Earth is third in line from the Sun), while 0055 is explained as the number of successful Mars rover landings: 5-of-5.
And since there are four digits in there, we get a sense of how many more machines NASA imagines sending to the Red Planet.
As you might already know, the rover carried with it the names of 10.9-million people stenciled on a microchip. The same chip also contains 155 essays submitted during the rover’s naming competition. Several inscriptions, the Earth address of Sherlock Holmes inscribed on a coin and, ironically, a piece of Martian meteorite were all transported from Earth to Mars.
Back to the PIN, the 17-digit number is as follows: AONREHMELN1730055. The first three letters (AON) are characters assigned by the Society of Automotive Engineers, while the following three (REH) stand for Rover Electric Helicopter (the last part on account of Ingenuity) and are meant to represent the type of vehicle.
Up next are the letters ME, which stand for location and objective, which would be Mars and Exploration. Then comes L, another character coming from the Society of Automotive Engineers, and N, which supposedly stands for the year 2022, when the rover is expected to meet its primary objective (study rocks).
Ending the string of characters are a bunch of numbers: 1 means NASA, 7 represent the number of instruments on the rover, 3 is the planet of origin (Earth is third in line from the Sun), while 0055 is explained as the number of successful Mars rover landings: 5-of-5.
And since there are four digits in there, we get a sense of how many more machines NASA imagines sending to the Red Planet.
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