A NASA Spacecraft Could Carry Your Name to Jupiter in 2024

An anonymous reader shared this report from the Washington Post: In 2024, a new spacecraft will hurtle toward Jupiter in a bid to learn whether its moon Europa is capable of supporting life. The craft will carry more than high-tech sensors: It also will bear a poem and hundreds of thousands of human names. Yours could be one of them. NASA is asking people to submit their names ahead of the mission's October 2024 launch. Those submitted by the end of 2023 will go into space on the Europa Clipper spacecraft, which should enter Jupiter's orbit in 2030... They'll eventually be stenciled onto a dime-sized microchip in microscopic writing, then attached to a metal plate engraved with the poem that will accompany the craft. 700,000 names have been submitted so far - and they'll all be carried a distance of over 1.8 billion miles. They'll travel through space with a poem that ends by describing what we humans on earth are made of - including "a need to call out through the dark."

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