– NASA’s Europa Clipper spacecraft, set to launch in October 2024, will carry a laser-etched message on a plate that celebrates humanity’s connection to water.
– The message includes 103 spoken words for “water” in different languages converted into waveforms. It aims to depict the diversity of Earth’s languages.
– It also includes visual depictions of the wavelengths of hydrogen and hydroxyl, the constituents of water. This is to communicate core scientific concepts across languages in case the spacecraft is discovered far in the future.
– The Europa Clipper is heading to Jupiter’s moon Europa, which is thought to have an ocean under its icy surface. Finding water elsewhere is key to the search for life.
– Past NASA missions like Voyager and Pioneer also carried messages etched onto the spacecraft in the form of plaques and records.
– The new message continues this tradition while celebrating the role of water. If the Clipper is ever retrieved after crashing into a moon, the graphic elements may still communicate to a very distant future finder.
– The organization METI International helped design the message, collecting language recordings and deciding how to represent them visually for engraving onto the plate.
Source: theconversation
