317 from Oman register to send their names to Jupiter

PHOTO

Muscat – Are you interested in sending a personal message to Jupiter? The National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) of USA is giving the public an opportunity of a lifetime to send their names in a spacecraft some 2.8bn km away.

NASA’s ‘Message in a Bottle’ campaign is inviting the public to add their names to a microchip that will accompany a poem by US Poet Laureate Ada Limón to Jupiter’s moon Europa on the Europa Clipper mission in 2024.

The campaign, designed to spark global interest in space exploration, also allows participants to create personalised souvenirs and encourages social media engagement.

‘Join the mission and have your name engraved on NASA’s Europa Clipper spacecraft as it travels 1.8bn miles to explore Europa, an ocean world that may support life. Sign your name today…,’ NASA said in its message to the public.

By September 3, 499,542 individuals had already registered for the Message in a Bottle campaign, including 317 from Oman. US is leading with 152,477 registrations, followed by India (66,270) and Iran (34,585).

The poem written by Ada connects the two water worlds – Earth, yearning to reach out and understand what makes a world habitable, and Europa, waiting with secrets yet to be explored.

The campaign is a special collaboration, uniting art and science, by NASA, the US Poet Laureate and the Library of Congress. The poem – In Praise of Mystery: A Poem for Europa – will be engraved on NASA’s robotic Europa Clipper spacecraft, along with participants’ names that will be etched onto microchips mounted on the spacecraft.

Europa Clipper is set to launch from NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in October 2024, and by 2030, it will be in orbit around Jupiter. Over several years, it will conduct dozens of flybys of Jupiter’s icy moon Europa, gathering detailed measurements to determine if the moon has conditions suitable for life.

Sensitive electronics for NASA’s Europa Clipper spacecraft will be enclosed in an aluminum-zinc alloy vault to protect the electronics from Jupiter’s intense radiation belts.