NASA Design for Humanity's Message to Jupiter’s Moon Europa | JPL

NASA Design for Humanity's Message to Jupiter’s Moon Europa | JPL

There is a legacy of NASA spacecraft carrying inspirational messages into the cosmos. Europa Clipper will continue this tradition when it launches in October 2024 to Europa—a moon of Jupiter that shows strong evidence of an ocean under its icy crust. A triangular plate seals an opening in the spacecraft’s vault. This protects Europa Clipper’s electronics from Jupiter’s radiation. The plate will carry a special message into the cosmos.

At the heart of the artifact is an engraving of U.S. Poet Laureate Ada Limón’s handwritten “In Praise of Mystery: A Poem for Europa,” along with a silicon microchip stenciled with more than 2.6 million names submitted by the public. The microchip will be the centerpiece of an illustration of a bottle amid the Jovian system—a reference to NASA’s “Message in a Bottle” campaign, that invited the public to send their names with the spacecraft. 

Learn more about the vault plate: 

https://europa.nasa.gov/spacecraft/vault-plate/

Download Europa Clipper Ocean World poster:

go.nasa.gov/3Gsjzt5

More information on the Europa Clipper mission: 

https://europa.nasa.gov/

Missions such as Europa Clipper contribute to the field of astrobiology, the interdisciplinary research on the variables and conditions of distant worlds that could harbor life as we know it. While Europa Clipper is not a life-detection mission, it will conduct detailed reconnaissance of Europa and investigate whether the icy moon, with its subsurface ocean, has the capability to support life. 

Understanding Europa’s habitability will help scientists better understand how life developed on Earth and the potential for finding life beyond our planet. The spacecraft needs to be hardy enough to survive a 1.6 billion-mile, six-year journey to Jupiter—and sophisticated enough to perform a detailed science investigation of Europa once it arrives at the Jupiter system in 2030.

Managed by Caltech in Pasadena, California, JPL leads the development of the Europa Clipper mission in partnership with APL for NASA’s Science Mission Directorate in Washington. APL designed the main spacecraft body in collaboration with JPL and NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland. The Planetary Missions Program Office at NASA’s Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Alabama, executes program management of the Europa Clipper mission.

Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech

Duration: 3 minutes

Release Date: March 8, 2024

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