Until December 31, anyone can sign up to include their name among the thousands to be sent on the Clipper mission to the Europa satellite
Discovered by Galileo more than 400 years ago, Europa is the fourth largest of Jupiter's 95 moons and the sixth largest in the entire solar system. Slightly smaller than the Moon, it has a diameter of 3,140 kilometers and is thought to hold twice as much water as all Earth's oceans combined .
And soon, what's more, it could also have your name .
Until the end of the year, everyone who wants to have the opportunity to send their name to Jupiter's satellite . Through the Message in a Bottle project , NASA is opening the door to signing up for the name to be part of a message that will travel through outer space.
The names will be entered into a silicon microchip, which, on the outside of the Clipper spacecraft, will travel 1.8 billion kilometers to Europa.
So far, more than 950,000 people have already entered the name to reach Jupiter . The country with the most names that will travel to Europe is the United States, with more than 300,000 names, as shown by NASA on a map .
Along with the names, the poem "In Praise of Mistery" written by American poet Ada Limón will also be sent .
"Riding on the outside of the spacecraft, the poem and the names will be like a message in a bottle ," concludes NASA .
The space agency frames this message in a bottle in the tradition of sending messages into space. In 1977, inside the Voyager ship was a time capsule with sounds and images that reflected life on Earth , selected by NASA and a committee chaired by Carl Sagan . Voyager, which left the solar system in August 2012 , is currently the furthest human-made object from Earth.
A mission to study Europe in depth
NASA's Clipper mission, which is scheduled to take off in October next year, aims to observe the satellite and assess whether the subsun has the necessary conditions for life to develop there .
In fact, the existence of oceans beneath the moon Europa has long been suspected, making it one of the prime 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 sustained could have developed there.
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