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Elsewhere on the rover is the autograph of the 14-year-old girl from Kansas who gave Curiosity its name

millions of digital signatures from members of the public who signed up through NASA

NASA's Mars program leaders round out the autographs on the plate

It's on the rover in the front left corner

it will be visible and that at some point will be photographed on Mars by Curiosity's camera-topped mast

"When we made the request to the White House for permission to launch, we took this along with us and said, 'Oh by the way, if you sign this we will stick it on the rover.'"

Clara Ma, who won NASA's naming contest with the suggestion of "Curiosity," signed the rover in 2009

As part of her prize, she was invited to the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in California, where in June 2009 she donned a "bunny suit" to step into a clean room and sign her name on the rover

Silicon chips attached to Curiosity's deck bear the digital signatures of people who submitted their names through NASA's website for going to Mars aboard the rover. Each chip is about the size of a dime

More than 1.24 million names were submitted online

etched into silicon using an electron-beam machine used for fabricating micro-devices at JPL

more than 20,000 visitors to locations of work on the rover at JPL and Kennedy Space Center wrote their names on pages, which were scanned and reproduced at microscopic scale on another chip

As Curiosity drives over the martian terrain, the groves in each wheel will form a string of 'dash' and 'dot' imprints — morse code that will spell out "J-P-L."

Mass 900 kg (2,000 lb)[

Power Radioisotope Thermoelectric Generator (RTG)

the general public had an opportunity to rank nine finalist names through a public poll on the NASA website

Curiosity was selected, which was submitted by a sixth-grader, Clara Ma, from Kansas in an essay contest

10 ft (3.0 m) in length

radioisotope thermoelectric generators (RTGs), as used by the successful Mars landers Viking 1 and Viking 2 in 1976

Radioisotope power systems are generators that produce electricity from the natural decay of plutonium-238, which is a non-fissile isotope of plutonium used in power systems for NASA spacecraft. Heat given off by the natural decay of this isotope is converted into electricity, providing constant power during all seasons and through the day and night, and waste heat can be used via pipes to warm systems, freeing electrical power for the operation of the vehicle and instruments

designed to produce 125 watts of electrical power from about 2000 watts of thermal power at the start of the mission

lifetime of 14 years, electrical power output is down to 100 watts

"Rover Compute Element" (RCE), contain radiation hardened memory to tolerate the extreme radiation environment from space and to safeguard against power-off cycles

256 kB of EEPROM, 256 MB of DRAM, and 2 GB of flash memory