ESA names Mars rover after chemist Rosalind Franklin

Rosalind Franklin will land on Mars in 2021. Not the famed crystallographer, of course; the European Space Agency announced it has named a rover designed to search for molecular signs of life after Franklin, who died in 1958.

ESA is collaborating with the Russian space agency to launch a mission to Mars in 2020 and land the rover at a site on the planet where water once flowed. The Rosalind Franklin rover will carry a mass spectrometer, a Raman spectrometer, and other sensors to look for biological and organic molecules that might indicate life, past or present. It’s the first spacecraft named after a chemist.

Franklin’s work on DNA, including a famous X-ray photograph of the molecule, was key to the eventual discovery of its double helix structure.