This will be the Europa Clipper probe

If everything goes according to plan, the probe Europe Clipper will take off aboard a SpaceX Falcon Heavy rocket this October. We are talking about an ambitious NASA mission, the main goal of which is to determine whether Jupiter’s moon Europa has suitable conditions for life.

The probe will travel more than 2.5 billion kilometers to reach its destination. But it will not only be equipped with a wide range of scientific instruments such as cameras and spectrometers. He will also take with him a plaque engraved in the purest style of the famous “golden records” of the legendary Voyager probes.

“Golden record” of the Europa Clipper probe

It’s not every day that we send complex engineering designs into the depths of space. NASA in the 1970s This was clear to him, and through a working group led by Carl Sagan, he prepared the gold disks of the Voyager probes to send a “message into space” that could last for millions of years.

The Europa Clipper probe provides a new opportunity to repeat this feat (although other missions have done it before), so the US space agency doesn’t want to miss it. This time it will not be a gold plate as such, but a metal plate engraved with various information representing our planet.

Over the course of several months, NASA developed a campaign known as “Message in a Bottle” in which it invited people from all over the world include their names on a microchip located in the center of a plate of a rare, non-corrosive metal called tantalum. Surprisingly, more than 2.6 million people took part.

Technicians at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory took it upon themselves to find a way to engrave so many names onto a coin-sized piece of silicon. And they did this by using a beam of electrons to create lines of text a thousand times smaller than a human hair (75 nanometers).

As we can see in the images, NASA has decorated both sides of the plate. One of the faces depicts bottle drawing floats in Jupiter’s orbit near its moons. Below is the poem “In Praise of Mystery: A Poem for Europe,” written specifically for the mission by American poet Ada Limón.

In the lower left corner is a portrait of Ronald Greeley, an Arizona State University professor who died in 2011 and whose contributions laid the foundation for the mission. Engraved at the top is the famous Drake Equation from the 1960s, which estimates the possibility of finding life beyond Earth.

On the other side of this plate, measuring approximately 18 by 28 centimeters, we find visual images of sound waves. They represent the work of a group of linguists who composed the word “water” in 103 languages. There is also a symbol in the center that means “water” in American Sign Language. This part should begin its journey to Jupiter as early as October this year.

Images | NASA (1, 2, 3)

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