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NASA’s marketing campaign to assemble names for a kind of “message in a bottle” that can fly with its upcoming Europa Clipper mission closes after this weekend, so should you have been hoping to take part however haven’t but made your submission, you’d higher hurry up and achieve this. The signatures will accompany a poem written for Europa by US Poet Laureate Ada Limón, which will probably be engraved in Limón’s handwriting on a steel plate connected to the spacecraft. Europa, one in every of Jupiter’s largest moons, is assumed to have a deep saltwater ocean beneath its icy crust — and there, the circumstances might be appropriate for microbial life.
To enter the Message in a Bottle marketing campaign, you simply must go to and fill out a brief signup kind. The deadline is tomorrow, December 31. Thus far, greater than 2.4 million folks have added their names. In accordance with NASA, the names of everybody who participated will probably be stenciled in tiny, tiny letters onto microchips utilizing an electron beam that may create strains of textual content smaller than 1/a thousandth the width of a human hair. These microchips will probably be affixed to the plate containing the poem.
The Europa Clipper spacecraft is scheduled to launch in October 2024, and it’ll be one other six years from then earlier than it reaches Jupiter’s orbit. As soon as there, it’ll examine Europa’s potential habitability by a collection of shut flybys. Europa is one in every of an estimated 95 moons circling Jupiter and among the many longest recognized to humanity.
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