Rosalind, a New Mars Rover, Is in Rare Company

When you read through the list of missions humankind has launched into space over the past 60 years, a pattern emerges.

There’s Hubble, the telescope that sighted countless glittering galaxies. Cassini and Galileo, which orbited Saturn and Jupiter, respectively, for years. Kepler, the discoverer of thousands of exoplanets; Herschel, the chronicler of the Milky Way’s star-forming regions; Huygens, the lander that plopped down on a Saturnian moon.

Magellan, Einstein, Newton, Planck, Euclid, Chandrasekhar, Fermi, Van Allen—these missions have provided scientists with heaps of information about the universe. And they are all named for men.

So it was a nice surprise when the European Space Agency recently that its next rover mission to Mars, launching in 2020, would bear the name of a woman: Rosalind Franklin, the English chemist whose