Message in a Bottle: You can send your name to one of Jupiter’s moons

The US space agency NASA offers anyone who wishes to add their name to an electronic chip that will board the Europa Clipper spacecraft next October to visit one of Jupiter’s moons.

The goal of the mission, which will launch in October 2024 to land more than 1.8 billion kilometers away in 2030 on Jupiter’s moon Europa, will be to search for signs of habitability, as well as to determine a possible landing site. for a future mission, the National Post reported Tuesday.

English-language media followed, because scientists would be almost certain that there is an ocean beneath the moon’s crust.

On board the ship, the space agency, which is accustomed to involving the public in its missions, plans to bring an electronic chip containing a list of the names of all those wishing to send their names into space, along with the poem “For Europe” by the American poet Ada Lemon.

So far, more than 867,500 people have added their names to the “Message in a Bottle” list, which has been growing rapidly since June 2023, with electronic signatures from all four corners of the map.

In Canada, more than 17,700 citizens also added their names.

In the past, NASA has asked the public several times to name its missions, with Sojourner, its first rover to land on Mars, mentioned in 1995, the National Post reported.

Two years later, the space agency also sent a mini-DVD containing 616,400 handwritten signatures, including that of actor Patrick Stewart, who played Captain Jean-Luc Picard in Star Trek: The Next Generation, to accompany a mission to Saturn.

Anyone who wants to add his name to the list can do so On the NASA websiteuntil December 31.