Which student won the contest to name the Spirit and Opportunity rovers?

Sofi Collis won the contest to name NASA’s Spirit and Opportunity rovers. She was a third-grade student from Arizona whose winning essay proposed names inspired by her own experience and the idea of exploration.

Collis was a Russian-American immigrant who had been adopted from an orphanage in Siberia. In her essay, she connected her personal journey to the rovers’ search for a new world, suggesting the names Spirit and Opportunity. NASA selected her entry in a competition sponsored by NASA, the Planetary Society, and LEGO.

The names were assigned to the two Mars Exploration Rovers launched in 2003. Spirit landed first, in January 2004, while Opportunity arrived several weeks later. Alex Mather won a different NASA naming contest for Perseverance in 2020, and Clara Ma supplied Curiosity’s name in 2009. Those later winners are common mix-ups, but neither named Spirit or Opportunity.