NASA has just announced the winner of their Name the Rover Contest: Perseverance. The contest invites K-12 students within the United States to submit names for the Mars 2020 rover along with an essay explaining why it is the best name. Sadly, not one of them suggested naming Mars 2020 rover "Sawppy" but I'll just have to get past that personal disappointment somehow.

I've already seen a few people calling it "Persie", "Percy", and variants thereof. The official Twitter handle is @NASAPersevere and judging by the first few tweets, this account will follow the trailblazing Phoenix PR effort and tweet from the first person. I'm doing the same for Sawppy, and @SawppyRover has followed @NASAPersevere for future updates. If all goes well, Perseverance wouldn't even be the only Mars-bound robotic explorer: the European Space Agency has designed one of their own. ExoMars 2020 is an interesting engineering marvel in and of itself, but that's for another blog post.

Back to the naming contest: I really like the cartoony rover they used. I've spent a lot of time analyzing photos, videos, and CAD models of Curiosity and Mars 2020 Perseverance when building Sawppy. I see a lot of technical accuracy represented in the illustration. From the robot arm joints to the rocker-bogie suspension components, I'm very impressed at how well it blends technical details with classic cartoon techniques for appealing character animation. I'm definitely keeping this guy in mind for my future rover work. (UPDATE: A few peeks have been posted to @SawppyRover.)

In the meantime I have to get on various parts of Sawppy's online documentation and update mentions of Mars 2020 to Perseverance. I'll definitely update greeting pages, but I probably won't bother to update every past project log. The rule of thumb: If it has a date, people can tell it was written before the announcement, so I will probably let it slide. If it doesn't have a date, I should probably fix it.

https://twitter.com/NASAJPL/status/1235642891239710720