Illustration of NASA’s Europa Clipper spacecraft
NASA/JPL-California Institute of Technology
In October, NASA’s Europa Clipper spacecraft will begin a journey to explore Jupiter’s icy moon Europa (imagined above).
NASA has asked METI International, the scientific organization I lead, to leverage our expertise in trying to make contact with extraterrestrial intelligence by creating a symbolic engraved tantalum plate on a spacecraft. We asked them to help us create a message, a greeting from one water world to another.
We helped create two parts of the message. First, we collected a globally representative sample of recordings of water words in 103 languages. Each language is displayed as a waveform on the outside of the panel (pictured above) that protects sensitive scientific equipment.
On the other, inward-looking side (see below), we designed the scientific part of the message. This refers to water in terms of the “water hole,” a frequency band between the hydrogen and hydroxyl (combining to form water) emission lines in the radio spectrum where many of the early searches for intelligence beyond Earth took place. I’m explaining.
Other parts of the internal message include: Drake equation to estimate the number of extraterrestrial civilizations in the galaxy. Microchips containing the names of 2.6 million supporters will be added soon.and Poet Laureate of the United States Ada Limon’s Poem to Europa ends like this. “O second moon, we too / are made of water, of a vast, beckoning ocean… / of the need to call out in the darkness.” The European Clipper will fly to Jupiter in April 2030. We are planning to enter the orbit of
douglas vacochChairman of Ministry of Economy, Trade and Industry International
topic:
- Jupiter/
- space exploration
