Send Your Name to Jupiter on NASA’s Europa Clipper

NASA’s Europa Clipper is currently set to launch no earlier than October 2024 and will study Jupiter’s moon Europa, one of the planets largest moons. This icy world is thought to have a deep liquid water ocean that may potentially be able to sustain marine life and other living organisms beneath its frozen surface. NASA is offering citizen scientists the chance to participate in the mission by sending their names with Europa Clipper as it orbits around Jupiter and performs flybys of Europa.

Illustration of NASA’s Europa Clipper flying over the moon with Jupiter in the background. Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech.

This is not the first time NASA has offered the option to send your name to space. Recently, space enthusiasts have had multiple opportunities to add their name to an engraved microchips that are currently on Mars aboard NASA’s InSight and Perseverance Rovers. This year, they also sent a USB drive full of names of registered participants on Artemis I, which performed an uncrewed flyby of the Moon in preparation for future crewed missions. NASA is even currently offering the chance to add your name to its next Mars mission, which is currently unnamed and unannounced.

NASA’s newest “send your name to space” offer is unique. Instead of participants receiving the typical digital boarding pass NASA has offered in the past, their names will instead be included as a “signature” at the bottom of a poem about Europa written by Ada Limón. Limón currently…