The brother and sister from Warton who have their names exploring Mars with NASA's Perseverance Rover

George Griffiths, eight, and Lucy Ellen Griffiths, 10, of Grasshopper Drive, are among 11 million people to have their names sent to the Red Planet as part of the Perseverance exploration

program.

The spacecraft made a successful landing on the planet on Thursday, inset, after setting off from Earth seven months ago.

Mum Anna, 36, applied to NASA more than two years but forgot about it until she saw the news last week.

She said: “It was probably on a Facebook page but I can’t remember where I had spotted the application form stuff but until I heard about the mission on the news last week I had completely forgotten I had signed up to it.

“It looked really interesting and George is really into planets and rockets so he is a bit of a space geek. I thought, ‘What a brilliant idea that we can send their names up to Mars.’”

George and Lucy Ellen, who attend Newton Bluecoat Primary School, also received their own commemorative boarding passes.

Anna said: “George and I watched the landing on TV and afterwards I found the passes so then I managed to tell him that, actually, the Rover he watched land on Mars has his name on it. He was very impressed with that.

“I think when you look at it in perspective as to how many billions of people there are on our planet, and only 11 million names have gone up with it, when I sort of explained that to them they were both just absolutely amazed.”

George said: “It’s so exciting that my name is on Mars and it is exploring. I really like watching the space missions so it makes it even better.”

The Perseverance rover landed in the Jezero crater, a 28-mile site which contains sediments of an ancient river delta, a location where evidence of past life could be preserved if it ever existed on the planet.

It is carrying instruments geared to search for the carbon building blocks of life and other microbes and to reconstruct the geological history of the Red Planet.

The instruments will analyse samples from the surface, with selected samples collected by drilling down seven cm and then sealed in special tubes and stored on the rover. It will also drop tubes on the surface of Mars to be collected by a future retrieval mission.