Taking your name to Jupiter's fourth largest moon is possible. The Clipper mission that will travel to Europa to explore the satellite of the enormous planet in the solar system will carry the names of more than a million people on a microchip.
The NASA campaign, open to everyone, allows anyone to sign up until the deadline ends at the end of the year; specifically on December 31 at 11:59 p.m. A spacecraft will travel more than 2.6 billion kilometers to that icy moon, which hides an ocean in its core, under a frozen outer layer. The registration to send the name can be found here.
To date, more than a million names have been submitted to the project that NASA has named "Message in a Bottle." Once all the names have been collected, technicians at NASA's Microdevice Laboratory in Southern California will use a beam of electrons to turn them into a coin-sized silicon microchip that will travel alongside the poem engraving. “In Praise of Mystery”, written by the American poet Laureate Ada Limón on the occasion of the mission. Each line of text is a thousand times narrower than the width of a human hair (75 nanometers).
The website also allows participants to create and download a customizable keepsake, an illustration of their name in a bottled message alongside a representation of Europa and Jupiter to commemorate the experience.
NASA's Clipper mission, which is scheduled to take off in October next year, aims to observe the satellite and evaluate whether the subsurface has the necessary conditions for life to develop. Europe is considered one of the main candidates to host life far from Earth. It is believed that in these large volumes of salt water the reactions necessary for life to arise and be maintained could have developed.
The three main scientific objectives of the mission are to determine the thickness of the moon's ice sheet and its surface interactions with its lower ocean, investigate its composition, and characterize its geology. Detailed exploration of Europa will help scientists better understand the astrobiological potential of habitable worlds beyond our planet.
