Send your name to the asteroid belt
Published on Nov 1, 2006 at 12:27 am.
5 Comments.
Filed under NASA, asteroids.
I saw this on Tom’s Astronomy Blog, and thought that I’d say a bit about it. NASA is preparing to launch a spacecraft to the asteroid belt. On board the spacecraft will be a microchip with names saved on it. So, click on the banner here and you can have your name sent to the asteroid belt! But, hurry! The deadline is only days away.
The on again, off again, Dawn mission seems to be on track to actually launch. At one point, it sure looked like the Dawn mission was going to be canceled. Dawn and New Horizons, which launched towards Pluto this past January, share similar missions. Both are set to investigate the earliest era of the Solar System’s history. Standard models say that most of the planets formed through the accumulation and merger of smaller bodies. Often these smaller bodies are called planetessimals. The difference between the two missions is simply the location and composition of the planetessimals that they are designed to study.
At the dawn of the solar system, many asteroids, meteoroids, and comets had merged to form these planetessimals. In the inner Solar System, the planetessimals would be mostly rocky (with some iron). In the outer Solar System, the planetessimals would also contain ices and organic molecules. The formation and migration of the outer planets (particularly Uranus and Neptune) scattered the leftover planetessimals out beyond the farthest planets to form the Kuiper Belt. Planetessimals in the inner Solar System, though, had a different fate. The inner Solar System is far more densly packed than the outer Solar System. So, over hundreds of millions of years, most of these bodies would run into either each other or into one of the planets, or perhaps even the Sun. Jupiter would act to keep them from being tossed into the outer Solar System. Most of these inner Solar System planetessimals, thus, are no more. Many became building blocks of the planets. Undoubtedly, many crashed into one another, creating families of asteroids and meteoroids. The iron and stony-iron meteorites are probably pieces of these smashed planetessimals (as well as most of the stony meteorites).
But, two of the planetessimals surviving to today are Vesta and Ceres. These are the two largest bodies in the asteroid belt are the primary targets of the Dawn mission. Understanding these bodies is important to our understanding of how our own planet formed, as well as how planets in general form. I am glad that they decided to go ahead with the mission.
As a public relations move, NASA is collecting names of people who would like to have their names etched onto a microchip to ride along on the Dawn spacecraft to the asteroid belt. This isn’t the first time that NASA has done something like this. In 1999, NASA collected names to be etched onto two microchips to ride along on the Stardust mission to Comet Wild-2. One of those chips was in the sample return capsule, and is now back on Earth. The other remained on the body of the spacecraft itself. In a special tribute, all the names engraved on the Vietnam War Memorial were also included on the chips. But even before that, the Planetary Society had collected postcards bearing signitures that were scanned and loaded onto a DVD that is now aboard the Cassini spacecraft orbiting Saturn. On previous missions, such as Galileo, Magellan, Voyager, etc, very thin metal disks holding hundreds of names of the scientists and engineers were placed onboard the craft. These thin metal wafers can only hold so many names. But Cassini, Stardust, and Dawn used different technology. With modern digital technology, far more images and bits of data can be carried than could ever have been etched onto metal wafers. These spacecraft carry thousands (actually, hundreds of thousands) of names of ordinarly people along with them. Kind of cool.
-Astroprof
Astroprof’s Page » Fly Your Name to Mars on February 5, 2007 at 6:03 pm: 1
[…] A few months ago, I posted about a program where you could send your name to the asteroid belt. Now, I’m going to tell you of an opportunity to send your name to Mars. […]
Astroprof’s Page » Names in Space on May 28, 2008 at 12:13 am: 2
[…] things. My signature is also in orbit about Saturn aboard the Cassini spacecraft. And, my name is on its way to the asteroid […]
Thomas Davies on June 4, 2008 at 10:19 am: 3
This is cool
Alex on July 24, 2008 at 8:11 am: 4
I did this in 2006, and i told all my friends about it too, theres a sense of pride knowing your name is on a very important mission to space.
michael on November 29, 2008 at 7:30 pm: 5
this is a great onor for me because i am verry into Astronomy