Sign NASA's 'Message in a Bottle' headed to Jupiter's moon Europa
UNIVERSE (CBSNewsTexas.com) - Did you send your name to the Moon aboard Artemis I?
Why not send it farther? All the way to Jupiter's icy moon Europa.
NASA is making it happen for thousands through its Message in a Bottle campaign inviting people around the world to sign their names to a poem written by the U.S. Poet Laureate Ada Limón. According to their website, "the poem 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 collaboration by NASA, Limón and the Library of Congress. The poem is engraved on NASA's robotic Europa Clipper spacecraft, along with participants' names that will be etched onto microchips mounted on the spacecraft. Together, the poem and names will travel 1.8 billion miles on Europa Clipper's voyage to the Jupiter system.
Europa is one of the largest of Jupiter's more than 90 moons. It's the sixth-closest moon to the planet. Europa and Jupiter's three other largest moons – Io, Ganymede, and Callisto – were the first moons discovered beyond Earth. They are called the Galilean moons after Italian astronomer Galileo Galilei, who first observed them with a homemade telescope in January 1610.
Scientists have said they're certain that hidden beneath the icy surface of Europa is a saltwater ocean with about twice as much water as Earth's global ocean.
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 Europa, gathering detailed measurements to determine if the moon has conditions suitable for life.
