NASA, the American space agency, is all set to launch a new mission to Jupiter's watery moon in October this year. The upcoming mission, Europa Clipper, will also carry a special message from the agency in several other languages including Hindi.
A triangular metal plate on the spacecraft, which is made from metal tantalum and measures 7 by 11 inches in size, features graphic elements on both sides. The outward-facing panel features the word “water” spoken in 103 languages from families of languages around the world including Hindi.
As per NASA, “ the audio files were converted into waveforms (visual representations of sound waves) and etched into the plate. The waveforms radiate out from a symbol representing the American Sign Language sign for “water”.
The plate will honour Jupiter’s moon Europa's connection to Earth as “the moon shows strong evidence of an ocean under its icy crust, with more than twice the amount of water of all of Earth’s oceans combined”.
“In the spirit of the Voyager spacecraft’s Golden Record, which carries sounds and images to convey the richness and diversity of life on Earth, the layered message on Europa Clipper aims to spark the imagination and offer a unifying vision,” NASA wrote in its newsroom.
NASA’s Europa Clipper Mission aims to conduct a detailed survey of Jupiter's moon Europa to determine whether there are places below the moon's surface that could support life.
In addition to this, the artifact also carries 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 featured in an illustration of a bottle in the Jovian system, as part of NASA's "Message in a Bottle" campaign that invited the public to send their names along with the spacecraft.
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