The National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) has launched a campaign called “Message in a Bottle” for which the space agency on Friday invited the public to send their names that will travel to Jupiter’s moon along with a poem dedicated to Europa Clipper mission. According to NASA, the poem and the names will be like a message in a bottle, travelling billions of miles as the mission investigates whether the ocean thought to lie beneath Europa’s icy crust could support life.
The spacecraft will begin its journey to Jupiter’s moon Europa in October next year.
How to send your name?
The last date to send the names is December 31 this year. “Names received before 11:59 p.m. EST, Dec. 31, 2023, will be stencilled onto a microchip, along with the poem, written by US Poet Laureate Ada Limón and titled “In Praise of Mystery: A Poem for Europa,” said NASA.
Click here to sign the poem with your name.
The site also enables participants to create and download a customizable souvenir – an illustration of your name on a message in a bottle against a rendering of Europa and Jupiter – to commemorate the experience.
Europa clipper
The Europa Clipper currently is being assembled, on camera, at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL). Set to launch from Florida’s Cape Canaveral the spacecraft will travel 1.8 billion miles (2.6 billion kilometers) to reach the Jupiter system, where it will arrive in 2030, said the agency in a press release. As it orbits Jupiter and flies by Europa about 50 times, it will log another half-billion miles (800,000 kilometers) while a suite of science instruments gathers data on the subsurface ocean, the ice crust, and the moon’s atmosphere.
