Sunday, 03 December 2023 | AFZAL FAUJI | NAINITAL
The US National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) is offering a unique opportunity to people from across the world- sending their names to its Europa Clipper spacecraft set to embark on a mission to Jupiter’s moon Europa next year. About nine lakh people from around the world have sent their names to NASA so far.
According to NASA, the names will ride aboard the spacecraft as it journeys 2.6 billion kilometres to this icy moon, where an ocean hides beneath a frozen outer shell. As part of the mission’s “Message in a Bottle” campaign which closes on December 31, technicians at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory will use an electron beam to stencil them onto a dime-size silicon microchip. The chip will be attached to a metal plate engraved with the original poem “In Praise of Mystery” written by US poet laureate Ada Limón to celebrate the mission. Riding on the exterior of the spacecraft, the poem and names will be like a message in a bottle as they make about 50 close flybys of the ocean world. The mission will log 800 million kilometres during these orbits as the spacecraft’s payload of science instruments gathers data on Europa’s icy crust, subsurface ocean and atmosphere to determine if the moon could support life. Scientists state that the possibility of life on Europa is higher compared to other planets. The Europa Clipper mission will play an important role in ascertaining this. The former director of the Aryabhatta Research Institute of Observational Sciences Wahab Uddin said that the opportunity granted by this mission is unique and exciting. It is likely that humans will land on Europa at some point of time in the future. The names sent with the spacecraft now will prove to be a unique record of history at that time, he added.
