Twenty-eight thousand students across the United States submitted essays and proposed names for NASA’s newest Mars rover and on Thursday, the agency announced the winner: Perseverance, submitted by Virginia seventh-grader Alexander Mather.
Sending the OSIRIS-REx spacecraft on an interplanetary trajectory to Asteroid Bennu, a United Launch Alliance Atlas 5 rocket thunders away from Cape Canaveral Thursday at 7:05 p.m. EDT (2305 GMT).