Photo: NASA
The most recent high-profile mission to another world was the Perseverance rover. The vehicle landed on the surface of Mars in February 2021, and with it so did humanity's hopes of learning more about the neighboring planet.
Perseverance carried a lot of things with it to the Red Planet, including three silicon chips mounted on an anodized plate. The chips contain 10,932,295 stenciled names of human beings, sent there as part of NASA's usual way of making us complicit to its missions.
Several other missions are on the horizon, and NASA plans to send human names along for the ride as well. Of extreme importance for our species is the Europa Clipper, scheduled to depart our world in the fall of next year.
Europe Clipper targets one of Jupiter's moons, the one called Europa. It will be the first purpose-designed mission to be sent out there, and it is tasked with sampling gas and dust from above the moon's surface.
To accomplish the task the spacecraft will circle Europa at least 50 times as it will try to determine if there are places below the celestial body's surface that could support life.
In a nutshell, the mission has three main objectives: get a sense of the nature of the ice shell, of the ocean we know is beneath it, and determine the moon's composition and geology. To do that, it will use a series of radars, magnetometers, and a series of sensors.
But this story is about none of that. We're here to talk about how many people are interested in sending their names to a distance that's hard to comprehend.
Just like Perseverance before it, Europa Clipper will take along for the ride a chip with human names stenciled on it, so tiny they're impossible to see with the naked eye, but there nonetheless.
NASA opened the books for those interested to include their name in June this year. The campaign is called Message in a Bottle, and it has caused quite a fuss among space exploration enthusiasts: to date there have been almost 900,000 names signed up for the mission.
All of them will be sent to space attached to a poem written by U.S. Poet Laureate Ada Limon and titled "In Praise of Mystery: A Poem for Europa" (you can check it out here).
If you plan on having your name sent deep into the solar system but haven't gotten around to it yet, you should know there isn't much time left. NASA will close the campaign on December 31, 2023, meaning we're now less than two months away from that moment.
Aside from having your name included on a space mission, NASA will gift you an "illustration of your name on a message in a bottle against a rendering of Europa and Jupiter."
Several other missions are on the horizon, and NASA plans to send human names along for the ride as well. Of extreme importance for our species is the Europa Clipper, scheduled to depart our world in the fall of next year.
Europe Clipper targets one of Jupiter's moons, the one called Europa. It will be the first purpose-designed mission to be sent out there, and it is tasked with sampling gas and dust from above the moon's surface.
To accomplish the task the spacecraft will circle Europa at least 50 times as it will try to determine if there are places below the celestial body's surface that could support life.
In a nutshell, the mission has three main objectives: get a sense of the nature of the ice shell, of the ocean we know is beneath it, and determine the moon's composition and geology. To do that, it will use a series of radars, magnetometers, and a series of sensors.
But this story is about none of that. We're here to talk about how many people are interested in sending their names to a distance that's hard to comprehend.
Just like Perseverance before it, Europa Clipper will take along for the ride a chip with human names stenciled on it, so tiny they're impossible to see with the naked eye, but there nonetheless.
NASA opened the books for those interested to include their name in June this year. The campaign is called Message in a Bottle, and it has caused quite a fuss among space exploration enthusiasts: to date there have been almost 900,000 names signed up for the mission.
All of them will be sent to space attached to a poem written by U.S. Poet Laureate Ada Limon and titled "In Praise of Mystery: A Poem for Europa" (you can check it out here).
If you plan on having your name sent deep into the solar system but haven't gotten around to it yet, you should know there isn't much time left. NASA will close the campaign on December 31, 2023, meaning we're now less than two months away from that moment.
Aside from having your name included on a space mission, NASA will gift you an "illustration of your name on a message in a bottle against a rendering of Europa and Jupiter."
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