Not everyone is lucky enough to send their names on a microchip that will ride aboard NASA’s Europa Clipper mission as it explores Jupiter’s moon and you can be one of them. The space agency’s “Message in a Bottle” campaign will allow you to do exactly that as long as you sign up before the end of they ear.
Hundreds of thousands of names have already been submitted. NASA will continue to collect names till 11.59 PM EST on December 31 (10.29 AM IST on January 1, 2024). After that, technicians at the agency’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Southern California will stencil them on to a coin-sized microchip using an electron beam. Each line of text will be about 75 nanometres or 1/1000th the width of a human hair.
After that, the chip will be attached to a metal plate that is engraved with the poem “In Praise of Mystery” written by American poet Ada Limon. The poem and the names riding on the exterior of the spacecraft will be like a “message in a bottle” as the spacecraft flies by Europa nearly 50 times.
You can sign up to send your name at europa.nasa.gov/message-in-a-bottle/sign-on/ . Apart from signing up and reading the poem, you can also download a customisable electronic souvenir from the site — an illustration of your name on a message in a bottle set against the backdrop of a rendering of Europa and Jupiter.
Jupiter’s Galilean moon Europa consists of a huge ocean of liquid water beneath its icy shell. The water is in contact with the rocky core of the moon, which, according to space scientists, make a range of interesting chemical reactions possible. Hence, astrobiologists consider the 1,940-miles-wide (3,120 kilometres) moon to be one of the best bets to host alien life in the solar system, according to a report by Space.com.
The Europa Clipper mission will be conducting an in-depth exploration of Jupiter’s moon Europa and investigate whether the icy moon can have suitable conditions for sustaining life and increase our insights in to astrobiology.
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First published on: 26-12-2023 at 3:43 pm IST
