NASA to Send Names of All Who Wish to Jupiter's Orbit
In October 2024, NASA will send the Europa Clipper spacecraft on a research mission to Europa, a moon of Jupiter. The spacecraft will have the names of all applicants on board, according to NASA.
The agency promises that people will be able to send a "message in a bottle" to Europe.
"Send your name to Jupiter aboard our Europa Clipper spacecraft. We'll use an electron beam to engrave your name, the names of your friends and family members, even your pet's name on a special chip. Cost: $0.00," the agency wrote on Twitter (X).
You can join the initiative for free here. Participants need to provide their first name, last name, email, country of residence and postcode.
NASA's Message in a Bottle campaign invites people around the world to sign their name to a poem written by US National Book Award winner Ada Limon.
She dedicated her poem "In Praise of Mystery: A Poem for Europe". The poem is engraved on the Europa Clipper spacecraft, and the names of the participants will be inscribed on microchips installed on the spacecraft.
"The poem connects two worlds of water - the Earth, which seeks to reach out and understand what makes the world habitable, and Europe, which waits with secrets yet to be explored. This is a special collaboration that brings together art and science between NASA, the US Nobel Prize winner in Literature, and the Library of Congress," NASA said.
Once all the names are collected, experts at the Microdevice Laboratory at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Southern California will use an electron beam to apply them to a microchip the size of a dime.
Each line of text is less than 1/1000th the width of a human hair (75 nanometres).
Together, the poem and the names will cover 1.8 billion miles during Europa Clipper's journey to Jupiter.
Europa Clipper is scheduled to launch in October 2024 from NASA's Kennedy Space Center. By 2030, the spacecraft will be in orbit around Jupiter.
Over the course of several years, it will make dozens of flybys of the Europa satellite, collecting data.
Europa Clipper is a project of NASA's Automated Interplanetary Station designed to study Jupiter's moon Europa. NASA's Europa Clipper mission will find out if the conditions for human life on Europa are suitable.
As The Gaze previously reported, a portrait of the world-famous British playwright William Shakespeare was sent into space in honour of the 400th anniversary of the publication of his one-volume edition of the First Folio in 1623. The portrait of Shakespeare, along with the text of A Midsummer Night's Dream, was attached to a weather balloon with a camera and GPS tracker and sent into the upper atmosphere.