Want your name to fly to Jupiter? Here’s what you can do – Times of India

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NEW DELHI: To raise public awareness of the ‘Europa Clipper’ mission before the spacecraft begins its long journey to Jupiter’s moon Europa in October 2024, NASA has launched a ‘Send Your Name to Europa” campaign, through which people around the world are invited to send their names as signatories to a poem called, “In Praise of Mystery: A Poem for Europa” written by the US Poet Laureate Ada Limón.
The poem is engraved on a tantalum metal plate affixed inside the Europa Clipper.
The inward-facing side of the metal plate will be engraved with the poem in the poet’s own handwriting, along with participants’ names that will be etched onto microchips mounted on the spacecraft.
Together, the poem and names will travel 2.6 billion kilometers on Europa Clipper’s voyage to the Jupiter system.
How to sign up
To sign your name, read the poem, and hear Limón recite the poem in an animated video, go to:
https://go.nasa.gov/MessageInABottle
Names received before 11.59 pm EST on December 31, 2023, [9.29am IST on January 1, 2024] will be accepted.
The site also enables participants to create and download a customisable souvenir – an illustration of your name on a message in a bottle against a rendering of Europa and Jupiter – to commemorate the experience
After registering their names, participants also received a digital ticket with details of the mission’s launch and destination.
Awareness campaign
The “Message in a Bottle” campaign is similar to other NASA projects that have enabled tens of millions of people to send their names to ride along with Artemis I and several Mars spacecraft. It draws from the agency’s long tradition of shipping inspirational messages on spacecraft that have explored the solar system and beyond.
In the vein of NASA’s Voyagers’ Golden Record, which sent a time capsule of sounds and images to communicate the diversity of life and culture on Earth, the programme aims to spark the imagination of people around the world.
Europa Clipper mission
Europa Clipper is currently being assembled, on camera, at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory.
Set to launch from Cape Canaveral, Florida, the spacecraft will travel 2.6 billion kilometers to reach the Jupiter system, where it will arrive in 2030.
As it orbits Jupiter and flies by Europa about 50 times, it will log another 800,000 kilometers while a suite of science instruments gathers data on the subsurface ocean, the ice crust, and the moon’s atmosphere.
Europa Clipper’s main science goal is to determine whether there are places below the surface of Europa that could support life.
The mission’s three main science objectives are to understand the nature of the ice shell and the ocean beneath it, along with the moon’s composition and geology. The mission’s detailed exploration of Europa will help scientists better understand the astrobiological potential for habitable worlds beyond our planet.





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