Like Robinson Crusoe sending a message in a bottle from a remote island, NASA wants to send a “small piece” of Earth bearing the names of various people on the planet, specifically, to Jupiter’s moon Europa in 2024. .
To do this, it will carry out a campaign in which it will introduce different names of all those who want to participate in the initiative in an original poem. A program centered around the US organization’s Clipper mission.
The message will travel billions of kilometers as it probes whether the ocean believed to be beneath Europa’s icy crust could support life, NASA said in a statement.
As part of the campaign, the names received by the end of the year will be engraved on a microchip, along with the poem “In Praise of Mystery: A Poem for Europe” by American poet Ada Limon. Registration form completed at: https://go.nasa.gov/MessageInABottle
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To commemorate the experience, participants are allowed to create and download a customizable memento, which features an interpretation of their name in a message on a bottle opposite a representation of Europa and Jupiter.
The campaign, similar to other NASA programs, allowed tens of thousands of people to submit their names to travel with Artemis I and various spacecraft to Mars.
Europa Clipper is currently being assembled into a camera at JBL. Planned to launch from Cape Canaveral, Florida, the spacecraft will travel 2.6 billion kilometers to reach the Jupiter system, where it will arrive in 2030. When it passes Europa 50 times around Jupiter, it will travel another 800,000 kilometers. A science instrument suite collects data on the moon’s subsurface ocean, ice crust and atmosphere.
