How Your Name Will Fly Aboard NASA’s Europa Clipper
Go behind the scenes in the Microdevices Laboratory at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Southern California to see how your name could be sent to Jupiter’s moon Europa as part of NASA’s “Message in a Bottle” campaign. Names will be stenciled in tiny letters on special microchips that will ride aboard the Europa Clipper spacecraft as it journeys 1.8 billion miles (2.6 billion kilometers) to the icy moon.
See how technicians will use an electron beam to stencil names onto microchips, where each line of text is smaller than 1/1000th the width of a human hair. The microchips will be attached to a metal plate engraved with the original poem “In Praise of Mystery,” written by U.S. Poet Laureate Ada Limón to celebrate the mission. That plate will then be attached to the exterior of the Europa Clipper spacecraft.
NASA’s Europa Clipper mission aims to determine whether Europa has conditions that could support life. Once spacecraft assembly has been completed at JPL, the orbiter will be shipped to NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida in preparation for launch in October 2024.
You can add your name to the “Message in a Bottle” campaign through Dec. 31, 2023. To sign, go to: https://go.nasa.gov/MessageInABottle
Find more information about Europa here: https://europa.nasa.gov/
JPL is a division of Caltech in Pasadena.
Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech
Transcript
Here's How Your Name Will Fly to Europa
NASA's Europa Clipper spacecraft will travel 1.8 billion miles to explore Jupiter's icy moon Europa.
Your name could go on a tiny microchip attached to the spacecraft.
To create the microchip, a team at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory first designs a unique silicon wafer.
The team converts bitmaps (small images) into tiny readable text.
Each line of names is 75 nanometers wide. That's 1/1000 the width of a human hair.
The team uses an electron beam to "stencil" names onto silicon microchips.
The microchips are then ready for our engineers to install onto the spacecraft!
Don't miss your chance.
Send your name on the Europa Clipper spacecraft today!