NASA announced its new campaign called “Message in a Bottle” on its website. As part of the campaign, NASA wants to add many names and messages to a microchip and send them into deep space.
This is all part of NASA’s Europa Clipper mission; Within the scope of this mission, a spacecraft will go to Jupiter and explore its moon Europa. The microchip will travel with the spacecraft 1.8 billion miles to the icy moon, where some scientists believe there may be signs of life beneath the moon’s frozen surface.
NASA announced that the “Message in a Bottle” campaign will close at 23:59 on December 31, 2023. This means you have just six weeks to add your message and your name to the list of those traveling to Europa next year. The agency announced that it has collected approximately 700,000 names so far to be added to the list.
Once all the names are collected, each line of text will be placed inside a 10-cent-sized silicon microchip, approximately 1/1,000 the width of a human hair. The chip will then be attached to a metal plate with the original poem “In Praise of Mystery” engraved on it.
NASA plans to launch the Europa mission in October 2024. The Message in a Bottle campaign will help send a time capsule of sorts on the spacecraft as it travels throughout our solar system to the deep space regions that Jupiter and its moons call home. Right now, you can go to NASA’s website to register your name and join the hundreds of thousands already listed.
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