In 2024, if all goes to plan, a spacecraft named Europa Clipper will embark on a journey to Jupiter’s icy, gray moons covered in rust-colored scars. It swims along the gravitational currents of Jupiter’s moons, half facing Jupiter from orbit and half exposed to the airless ocean of space. And along with its high-tech spectrometers, radar systems, optical imagers, and other equipment built to search for evidence of alien habitats. european clipper I’ll bring my name. You can also bring your own.
Just sign up Click here for NASA’s free Message in a Bottle Program. Campaign ends on December 31st at 11:59pm ET (January 1st 0459GMT). As I write this, almost 900,000 names have been entered.
However, if you don’t know why this is important, you’re not alone. As soon as I signed my name, I honestly thought pretty deeply about why I wanted this to happen before I even knew what it meant. After all, the spaceship doesn’t land anywhere.no one is riding europa to receive our messages. Each name is one among hundreds of thousands of other names. Even our names are just intangible concepts created to indicate our existence, and linguists and philosophers have long fallen into this idea. What would our name be without us? Where did it really go without anyone reading it?
This sent me into a spiral. It felt like I was participating in a very abstract concept.
Related: Poem for the European Clipper: U.S. Poet Laureate Ada Limon reveals hymn to fly on NASA’s Jupiter Moon mission
I finally decided that the purpose of this might be to have no physical results, or even any noticeable theoretical results for that matter. I think the reason I sent my name to Europa was because it wasn’t supposed to be there. I’m earthbound, so if my name has no meaning without my presence, perhaps it should remain here as well. But thanks to modern technology, that doesn’t have to be the case.
Even if my name has no concrete existence in reality and therefore should be able to “travel” across light years and perhaps even dimensions, unless there is a thinker in that location, I don’t know if it is possible to “exist” in. Its. And no one in Europe (probably as far as we know) thinks of it. Or think of you.maybe NASA offers us the next best thing, allowing us to reside somewhere other than the Earth’s neighborhood, the only neighborhood our name has ever been considered for.
So, after sorting all this out and telling my family that I had signed up as well (my dad predictably responded with a thumbs up emoji and the word “OK”), I decided that Message in a Bottle would be I understand how exactly it works.
In a nutshell, scientists at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory have designed a special “silicon wafer” that looks like a highly shiny metal disk. You can then convert a small image, for example the speech bubble letter “A”, into very small, readable text. Those small images are called “bitmaps.” Each name entered into the project goes through this process, resulting in text at a scale of 75 nanometers, or one-thousandth the width of a human hair. All names are “stenciled” via an electron beam onto the silicon microchip built from the original wafer.
All of these chips will be mounted aboard the Europa Clipper and are expected to travel more than a billion miles, catapulting the forces of other planets until they reach the gravitational embrace of Europa. The spacecraft will then make its 50th near-flight over the Moon, at a closest altitude of just 16 miles (25 kilometers) above the surface. In the meantime, it will be dutifully searching for evidence of an underground ocean, and perhaps even an ocean. biosignature.
Excerpt from one of my favorite paragraphs: Novel “Red Mars” Microchips engraved with words representing approximately 1 million humans will be placed in a place where the Earth looks like nothing more than a star.
In the end, this whole exercise may not change anything except my perspective, but I think it’s good enough.