NASA’s ‘Message in a Bottle’ project: Your names will be sent into space

NASA is giving people the chance to submit their names to the next spacecraft bound for Jupiter, billions of kilometers away.

The ‘Message in a Bottle’ project will have people’s names inscribed on the Europa Clipper spacecraft and the public has been asked to submit their names for free before the end of 2023.

The Europa Clipper is also inscribed with a poem by American poet Ida Lemon, titled ‘In Praise of Mystery: A Poem for Europa.’

The poem was presented to the Library of Congress earlier this year when the NASA mission was first introduced.

“Writing this poem was one of the greatest honors of my life, but it was also one of the most difficult tasks I have ever been entrusted with,” Lemon said.

Ultimately, what completed this poem was the realization that while learning about other planets, stars, and moons, we are also learning about our great gift, Earth. Pointing outward is also pointing inward.’

The mission will launch in October 2024 and reach Jupiter’s orbit 2.9 km (1.8 billion miles) away in 2030.

Its purpose is to investigate whether or not there is life in the ocean beneath Europa’s icy layers.

The radiation-tolerant spacecraft will enter a looping orbit around Jupiter and take a closer look at the icy moon with its onboard instruments.

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Scientists hope that Europa has all the ingredients for life to originate and grow.

Robert Pappalardo, a project scientist on the Europa Clipper mission, says: ‘If there is life on Europa, it is certainly completely unrelated to the origin of life on Earth.

This would mean that the origin of life throughout the galaxy and beyond must be very simple.’

This is not the first time that NASA will send messages from Earth to space via a rocket. He sent gold-coated phonograph records with his Voyager 1 and 2 spacecraft in the 1970s.

The US space agency says the Golden Record is ‘a kind of time capsule intended to tell the story of our world to extraterrestrial bodies.’