Send your name to Mars aboard NASA’s next mission

Submissions will be accepted until September 8.

The “fly-your-name” opportunity comes with “frequent flier” points to reflect an individual’s personal participation in NASA’s journey to Mars, which will span multiple missions and multiple decades. From India there are now 8473 people, who have submitted their names for the mission, as revealed by website.

“Our next step in the journey to Mars is another fantastic mission to the surface”, Jim Green, NASA director of planetary science, said in a statement. Either way, with the opportunity entirely free of cost and the registration hardly taking a minute, it won’t that much of a waste of time to visit the NASA website and have your name registered for a ride into the space.

The Insight Lander is scheduled to blast off to Mars in 2016, and will carry with it a silicon microchip containing all the submitted names.

Don’t dawdle. Because after InSight, you’ll have to wait about three years until late 2018 and the blastoff of the next Orion capsule on NASA’s Exploration Mission-1 (EM-1) for you next chance to accumulate “frequent flier” points on a “Journey to Mars” mission.

Mars enthusiast can register their name here.

Sending your name to Mars may mean nothing, or it may mean something.

In December 2014, 1.38 million names flew to space for the Orion spacecraft’s first uncrewed flight, NASA said. It will drill deep into the surface of Mars, pondering the interiors of the planet for the first time, and with a seismometer affixed to the lander measuring Martian quakes.

The latest launch is set to take place in March 2016.

InSight is designed to peer into Mars’ interior, learning more about the composition of the planet to help researchers on Earth find out more about how the rocky planets of the solar system formed, NASA said.

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It is funded by NASA’s Discovery Program as well as several European national space agency’s and countries.