By- Shivanshi Srivastava
Europa Clipper will embark on a journey to an icy, gray moon of Jupiter covered in rust-colored gashes.
Alongside its high-tech spectrometer, radar system, optical imager to search for proof of alien habitats, Europa Clipper will be bringing 9 lakh people's name. It can bring yours, too.
You just have to sign up for NASA's free "Message in a Bottle program" here.
The campaign closes at 11:59 p.m. EST on Dec. 31 (0459 GMT on Jan. 1); at the time I'm writing this, almost 900,000 names have been entered.
NASA will turn small images like, say, a bubble letter "A" into very tiny, readable text. Those small images are called "bitmaps."
Each name entered into the project will undergo this process, eventually becoming text on the scale of 75 nanometers, or a thousandth the width of a human hair.
All the names can then be "stenciled" on silicon microchips, built from the original wafers, via an electron beam.
Chips loaded onto the Europa Clipper, which will travel over a billion miles while catapulting itself through the forces of other planets until it reaches the gravitational embrace of Europa.
Microchips engraved with words that represent almost 1 million humans will sit in a location from which the Earth appears as only a star.