The National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) launched a campaign called “Message in a Bottle,” for which the space agency asked the public on Friday to submit their names to fly to Jupiter’s moon, along with a poem dedicated to the Europa Clipper mission.
According to NASA, the poem and names will be like a message in a bottle that travels billions of miles as the mission investigates whether the ocean believed to lie beneath Europa’s icy crust can support life. The spacecraft will begin its journey to Jupiter’s moon Europa in October next year.
How to submit your name?
The deadline for submitting names is December 31 this year. “Names received before 11:59 p.m. EST, December 31, 2023, will be inscribed on a microchip along with a poem written by American Poet Laureate Ada Limón titled ‘In Praise of Mysteries: A Poem for Europa,'” NASA said.
The site also allows participants to create and download a customizable souvenir – an illustration of your name on a message in a bottle against depictions of Europa and Jupiter – to commemorate the experience.
Europa clipper
The Europa Clipper is currently being mounted on a camera at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL). Set to launch from Cape Canaveral, Florida, the spacecraft will travel 1.8 billion miles (2.6 billion kilometers) to reach the Jupiter system, where it will arrive in 2030, the agency said in a news 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 collects data on the subsurface ocean, icy crust and lunar atmosphere.
