10 Famous Names Chosen by Kids, Like the Mars Rover a 13-Year-Old Named Perseverance

In 2020 NASA asked American students to name its next Mars rover, and about 28,000 entries came in. The winner was Alexander Mather, a 13-year-old seventh grader from Burke, Virginia.

Earlier rovers, he argued, were named for qualities people already have, like curiosity and the drive to find opportunity. One was missing. In his essay he wrote: “But if rovers are to be the qualities of us as a race, we miss the most important thing: Perseverance.” Perseverance landed on Mars in February 2021 and is still at work there.

Before it had a name, Curiosity was called the Mars Science Laboratory. In 2009 NASA held a student contest and received more than 9,000 proposals. The panel picked the essay by Clara Ma, a 12-year-old sixth grader at Sunflower Elementary in Lenexa, Kansas.

“Curiosity is such a powerful force. Without it, we wouldn’t be who we are today,” she wrote. Her prize was a trip to JPL, where she could sign her name on the rover while it was being built. Curiosity has been on Mars since August 2012.

In 2003 NASA had twin rovers ready for Mars and no names for either. The contest drew nearly 10,000 entries, and the winner was Sofi Collis, a 9-year-old third grader from Scottsdale, Arizona. She was born in Siberia and adopted at age 2.

At the unveiling, Sofi read her essay: “I used to live in an orphanage. It was dark and cold and lonely. At night, I looked up at the sparkly sky and felt better. I dreamed I could fly there. In America, I can make all my dreams come true. Thank you for the ‘Spirit’ and the ‘Opportunity.’”

On the morning of March 14, 1930, Venetia Burney, 11, sat down to breakfast in Oxford with her grandfather, who was reading the newspaper. Astronomers in Arizona had found a new planet. Venetia suggested calling it Pluto, after the Roman god of the underworld.

Her grandfather dropped a note at the house of a friend, an Oxford astronomy professor, who sent the idea by telegram to Lowell Observatory, where the planet had been found. On May 1, 1930, the name was formally adopted, and her grandfather gave her a five-pound note.

Mathematician Edward Kasner wanted a name for an enormous number, a 1 followed by 100 zeros. He asked his nine-year-old nephew, Milton Sirotta, and the boy came up with “googol.”

Kasner told the story in a 1940 book, along with an even bigger number, the googolplex. Its first definition was a 1 “followed by writing zeros until you get tired.” Kasner pointed out that different people get tired at different times, so he made it exact: a 1 followed by a googol of zeros.

The first rover to drive on Mars got its name from a contest for students up to 18, who had to choose a heroine and write about her. JPL and The Planetary Society read 3,500 entries from around the world, and the winner was Valerie Ambroise, 12, of Bridgeport, Connecticut.

She wrote about Sojourner Truth, an abolitionist and champion of women’s rights who made it her mission to “travel up and down the land.” NASA liked that sojourner means “traveler.” The little rover rolled onto Mars in July 1997.

Vaneeza Rupani, a junior at Tuscaloosa County High School in Northport, Alabama, entered the same 2020 contest that named Perseverance. Her essay didn’t win the rover, but NASA gave her word to the small helicopter flying to Mars with it.

“The ingenuity and brilliance of people working hard to overcome the challenges of interplanetary travel are what allow us all to experience the wonders of space exploration,” she wrote. Ingenuity was planned for up to five test flights. It made 72.

In 1998 NASA asked the public to name its new X-ray telescope, and more than 6,000 entries came from 50 states and 61 countries. The two winners sent the same name: Tyrel Johnson, a 10th grader from Laclede, Idaho, and Jatila van der Veen, a high school physics and astronomy teacher in Camarillo, California.

Chandra honors the astrophysicist Subrahmanyan Chandrasekhar, and in Sanskrit the word means “moon” or “luminous.” The telescope launched in July 1999, and NASA was still releasing new Chandra images in 2026.

A. A. Milne’s son, Christopher Robin, got a teddy bear for his first birthday in 1921. A few years later he met Winnie, a black bear at London Zoo who had come from Canada and was named after the city of Winnipeg.

Her keepers let the boy into her pen to play with her and feed her condensed milk from a spoon, and he renamed his teddy after her. His father put the bear in a book, and Winnie-the-Pooh came out in 1926.

Students at the University of Colorado Boulder built a dust detector for NASA’s New Horizons probe, the first student-built science instrument on a NASA planetary mission. In 2006, the year it launched, it was renamed the Venetia Burney Student Dust Counter. That same year Pluto was reclassified as a dwarf planet, but nobody changed its name.

On July 14, 2015, the instrument flew past Pluto. It kept counting dust beyond it, and in 2024 its readings hinted that the Kuiper Belt may stretch much farther than anyone thought.