JUMPIN’ JUPITER PROBE
Alien-life search
Can you hear me now? NASA is launching a “message in a bottle” to Jupiter later this year as part of its quest to find alien life on the gas giant’s moon.
The agency’s Europa Clipper spacecraft will blast off toward Jupiter’s moon Europa from Florida’s Kennedy Space Station in October, dispatching a steady stream into the ether of 2.6 million soundwaves of humankind saying their own names.
“The content and design of Europa Clipper’s vault plate are swimming with meaning,” Lori Glaze, director of the Planetary Science Division at NASA Headquarters in Washington, said in a statement.
It will take Europa Clipper nearly six years to make the 0.6 billion-mile journey to Jupiter’s moon — with an estimated arrival time of April 2030. The spacecraft will orbit Jupiter and make 49 close flybys of Europa, which shows strong evidence beneath its icy crust of a global ocean over twice the volume of all Earth’s oceans combined.
Eyeing icy surface
The spacecraft’s mission is to determine whether the moon has conditions underneath its icy surface that could support life and “help scientists better understand the astrobiological potential for habitable worlds beyond our planet.”
As it circumvents the planet, Europa Clipper will beam out the “richly layered dispatch” of the millions of names.
The touching detail is not the only sentimental aspect of the mission — the spacecraft will also be etched with US Poet Laureate Ada Limón’s handwritten “In Praise of Mystery: A Poem for Europa,” as well as a portrait of one of the founders of planetary science, Ron Greeley, and a reference to the radio frequencies considered plausible for interstellar communication.
Also etched onto the spacecraft’s triangle plate will be the Drake equation, the 1961 mathematical formulation created to estimate the possibility of finding advanced civilizations beyond Earth.
Messages go out
Additionally, as a symbol of connection between the two planets, the ship will contain etched waveforms for the word “water” in 104 languages.
“The plate combines the best humanity has to offer across the universe — science, technology, education, art and math. The message of connection through water, essential for all forms of life as we know it, perfectly illustrates Earth’s tie to this mysterious ocean world we are setting out to explore,” Glaze said.
The mission closely follows NASA’s storied tradition of sending inspirational messages into space but is being particularly modeled after the Voyager spacecraft’s Golden Record, which in 1977 emitted two phonograph records containing sounds and images selected to portray the diversity of life and culture on Earth into space for any intelligent aliens to find.