Humanity’s message from one water world to another, on a piece of tantalum metal :

⁣There’s a legacy of NASA spacecraft carrying inspirational messages from Earth into the cosmos, and Europa Clipper will soon continue this tradition when it launches 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, which protects electronics from Jupiter’s radiation. The plate carries a special message into deep space. ⁣

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Image Descriptions:⁣

1. An intricate pattern of waveforms for the word “water” in more than 100 languages emanate from the center to the edges of a triangular metallic plate. Linguists collected recordings of the word from families of languages around the world. The waveforms radiate outward from a symbol representing the American Sign Language gesture for “water.”⁣

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2-3. The reverse side of the vault plate features a poem written by U.S. Poet Laureate @adalimonwriter titled “In Praise of Mystery: A Poem for Europa” etched in her handwriting. Above the poem is an illustration of the Jovian System — four round moons in circular orbits around a bottle. This is a reference to our “Message in a Bottle” campaign, which invited the public to send their names with the spacecraft. Soon to be added to the center of the bottle is a silicon microchip stenciled with more than 2.6 million names submitted by the public. There is a portrait of Ron Greeley on the bottom left, whose early efforts to develop a Europa mission laid the foundation for Europa Clipper. Next to this is artwork that references radio frequencies considered plausible for interstellar communication, symbolizing how humanity uses this radio band to listen for messages from the cosmos. ⁣

⁣4. The Drake Equation is inscribed at the top of the vault plate. Astronomer Frank Drake developed the mathematical formulation in 1961 to estimate the possibility of finding advanced civilizations beyond Earth, and this equation has inspired and guided research in astrobiology fields ever since. ⁣

Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech

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09 March 2024