Stay tuned in to our local news coverage: Listen to 90.7 WMFE on your FM or HD radio, the WMFE mobile app or your smart speaker — say “Alexa, play NPR” and you’ll be connected.

The next Mars rover finally has a name. A middle school student from Burke, Virginia came up with the winning suggestion.

No, it’s not Rovey McRoverface — the rover formerly known as Mars 2020 is now called Perseverance.

Around 28,000 entries were received in a public essay contest, but ultimately 7th grader Alex Mather’s suggestion was selected:

“If rovers are to be the quality of us as a race, we missed the most important thing — Perseverance,” Mather wrote in the winning essay.

The rover will scour the surface of the red planet looking for signs of past life on Mars and prepare samples for a future mission to send them back to Earth. Perseverance will launch from Cape Canaveral in July, arriving on the red planet February 2021.