Technicians at Lockheed Martin Space in Littleton, Colorado installed a microchip with 1.6 million names submitted by the public to ride along with NASA's InSight mission to Mars. The chip was installed on Jan. 23, 2018. This joins another microchip that was previously installed that included 800,000 names for a grand total of 2.4 million names going to Mars as early as May 5, 2018. The microchip including names from the NASA InSight mission's "Send Your Name to Mars" campaign was affixed to the spacecraft with a special glue. https://photojournal.jpl.nasa.gov/catalog/PIA22206

Second dime-size microchip carrying 1.6 million names gets processed for installation onto the InSight lander. Technicians at Lockheed Martin Space in Littleton, Colorado installed a microchip with 1.6 million names submitted by the public to ride along with NASA's InSight mission to Mars. The chip was installed on Jan. 23, 2018. This joins another microchip that was previously installed that included 800,000 names for a grand total of 2.4 million names going to Mars as early as May 5, 2018. The microchip including names from the NASA InSight mission's "Send Your Name to Mars" campaign was affixed to the spacecraft with a special glue. https://photojournal.jpl.nasa.gov/catalog/PIA22237

An engineer in the clean room at Lockheed Martin Space in Littleton, Colorado, affixes a dime-size chip onto the lander deck of NASA's InSight spacecraft. This second microchip, contains 1.6 million names submitted by the public to ride along with InSight to Mars. The chip was installed on Jan. 23, 2018. This joins another microchip that was previously installed that included 800,000 names for a grand total of 2.4 million names going to Mars as early as May 5, 2018. Engineers at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, California, put the names onto this tiny 0.3 square inches (8 millimeter-square) silicon wafer microchip using an electron beam to write extremely tiny letters with lines smaller than one one-thousandth the width of a human hair. The dime-size chip is affixed to the InSight lander deck and will remain on Mars forever. Normally used to make high-precision nanometer-scale devices, this technique was also used to write millions of names that were transported on NASA Mars rovers and Orion's first test flight. InSight is the first Mars mission dedicated to study the deep interior of Mars. Its findings will advance understanding of the early history of all rocky planets, including Earth. https://photojournal.jpl.nasa.gov/catalog/PIA22236

A camera calibration target sits on the deck of the NASA's InSight lander, adorned with the flags of the countries participating in the mission. The target, which will be viewed by InSight's cameras, provides a variety of colors and shapes to help calibrate the lander's cameras. It also shows off international flags representing the agencies, institutions and participating scientists of the mission as of late 2014 (since that time, Italy has contributed an experiment). In the second row are the United States flag and the logos of NASA, the French space agency CNES, which provided InSight's seismometer; and the German Aerospace Center DLR, which provided InSight's heat flow probe. Below the target in the photo is an Italian experiment called the Laser Retroreflector for InSight (LaRRI). LaRRI is the small, copper-colored dome covered with circles just below the calibration target; it won't actually play a role in InSight's mission. The national space agency of Italy (ASI, for Agenzia Spaziale Italiana) provided LaRRI to be used by a possible future Mars orbiter mission with a laser altimeter making extremely precise measurements of the lander's location for fundamental physics studies and precision cartography. A microchip bearing the names of nearly a million members of the public is visible in this image to the right of the calibration target. A second microchip with more than a million additional names was added after this photo was taken. https://photojournal.jpl.nasa.gov/catalog/PIA22540

The dime-size microchip in this close-up image carries 826,923 names that will go to Mars on NASA InSight lander. The image was taken in November 2015 inside a clean room at Lockheed Martin Space Systems, Denver, where the lander was built.