STEVENAGE: A British-made rover that will set off for Mars next year in search for signs of life was named on Thursday after DNA pioneer Rosalind Franklin.

UK astronaut Tim Peake revealed the name of the first European scavenger of the Red Planet at the Airbus factory just north of London where it was built.

Cambridge-educated Franklin “helped us understand life on Earth and now her namesake will do the same on Mars,” UK Science Minister Chris Skidmore said at the unveiling.

The brilliant, but long-unrecognised, 20th century British scientist’s name was selected with the help of a public competition in which nearly 36,000 took part.

“Just as Rosalind Franklin overcame many obstacles during her career, I hope ‘Rosalind the Rover’ will successfully persevere in this exciting adventure, inspiring generations of female scientists and engineers to come,” said Skidmore. Franklin’s work was used to formulate the seminal 1953 hypothesis about the structure of DNA — the molecule containing an organism’s genetic code.

She died of cancer at the age of 37 in 1958.

The three men who were awarded the Nobel Prize for their work on DNA four years later did not mention Franklin in their acceptance speeches. Franklin’s contribution to their research remained largely overlooked in science books until the 1990s. The new rover is planned to land on Mars in 2021 as part of the ExoMars programme which is being conducted jointly by the European Space Agency (ESA) and its Russian counterpart Roscosmos.

Published in Dawn, February 8th, 2019