Here’s the flag on the instrument deployment device (IDD), the rover’s “arm” on Opportunity. All that dust on the instrument is left over from using its rock abrasion tool (sort of a grinder/drill) on the exposed rocks during Opportunity’s 31st Martial day.
I also missed an obvious “2-fer” on Spirit! Beyond the decal on the IDD, Spirit also carried with it a memorial to the crew of the Space Shuttle Columbia, STS-107.
The above memorial plaque carries the US flag, along with the names of the Astronauts who were lost on the Columbia. If you look closely you can see an additional Israeli flag next to the name of Ilan Ramon, Israel’s first astronaut.
As a bonus here’s a shot of the first “nationally branded” object deployed to the surface of the Moon
These two steel spheres (diameters 7.5 and 12 cm respectively) were carried to the Moon by the Soviet Union’s Luna-2 spacecraft. Each of these spheres was filled with a an explosive designed to fragment them like a very large grenade, showering the Lunar surface with the little pentagonal pennants that the spheres were crafted out of. It is really unlikely that any of these little medals survived. On September 13, 1959 Luna-2 didn’t land gently on the Moon, but rather plowed into it at over 3 km/s. The energy generated by the impact of a 400kg spacecraft at the speed would generate enough heat to vaporize steel. One of the ideas behind the explosives inside the spheres was to try and remove some of the impact velocity, and thus allow at least some of them to survive. It’s possible but, in my opinion, unlikely that they made it through the impact intact.
The first Soviet Moon probe, Luna-1, also carried a similar sphere, but missed the moon (Luna-1 passed within 6,000 km of the Moon on January 4, 1959), and is now in a 450 day orbit about the Sun.
