A Poem Is Going to Jupiter's Moon Europa (& You Can Go, Too)

This week, U.S. Poet Laureate Ada Limón at the side of the Library of Congress introduced that NASA’s Europa Clipper shall be launching on its mission in October 2024 with “In Praise of Mystery: A Poem for Europa.” The poem, written by Limón, will journey 1.8 billion miles by the galaxy. It shall be engraved on the house craft.

There has lengthy been hypothesis of life on Europa beneath its ice-covered ocean. Whatever that life would possibly appear to be is but to be recognized, however the mission will present very important details about the moon’s inhabitants, tradition, terrain, and potential for supporting life. The Europa Clipper is anticipated to land on Jupiter’s moon in 2030.

More, you possibly can have your title included as a part of the mission. Anyone who’d like to signal the poem because it hurtles by house could accomplish that at NASA’s Mission in a Bottle web site. Every title included earlier than December 31, 2023, shall be engraved on a microchip to accompany the poem.

“Writing this poem was one of the greatest honors of my life, but also one of the most difficult tasks I’ve ever been assigned,” Limón stated at an occasion held on the Library of Congress to announce the challenge. “Eventually, what made the poem come together was realizing that in pointing toward other planets, stars and moons, we are also recognizing the enormous gift that is our planet Earth. To point outward is also to point inward.”

NASA has launched comparable tasks earlier than, permitting anybody who wished to ship their title into house to accomplish that with Artemis I and a number of other Mars spacecraft. The present Mission in a Bottle efforts are comparable to the Golden Record despatched aboard the Voyager, which despatched into house an array of sounds and pictures from throughout the globe into house.

“Ada Limón is a brilliant poet whose work often connects readers with the natural world, so her Poem for Europa is powerful in communicating our human instincts for art, science and exploration,” stated Librarian of Congress Carla Hayden in the course of the announcement of the initiative. “Sending a poem into space on a mission to explore our solar system is an incredible opportunity for us all to reflect and sign on to Ada’s poem as a ‘Message in a Bottle’ from Earth.”

Find beneath the announcement of this system, the place Limón unveiled the poem and carried out it.