The US National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) is getting ready to launch a spacecraft to Europa, one of Jupiter's many moons, next October.
It's far from a passenger ship, so you can't buy a seat aboard but you can have your name in it — for free.
Aboard the spacecraft will be a microchip bearing a poem by US Poet Laureate Ada Limón.
And NASA is inviting people from all around our big blue globe to sign their name to the poem.
NASA has likened it to sending message in a bottle — only instead of a scroll of paper, the message will be on a microchip and instead of a bottle, it will travel in a highly-sophisticated spacecraft that's almost the size of a basketball court.
How do I add my name to the Jupiter mission?
You can do it online in a few seconds.
Go to NASA's Europa website and hit the "participate" link at the top, then go to the Message in a Bottle page.
Click the red button that says "send your name" and follow the prompts to fill out the form.
It'll ask for your first and last name, your country and your postcode.
But you don't have to include your email address if you don't want to — it's just if you want to sign up for NASA's email newsletters.
What's the poem that'll be sent to Jupiter?
Here's Ada Limón's poem called In Praise of Mystery: A Poem for Europa:
Arching under the night sky inky
with black expansiveness, we point
to the planets we know, we
pin quick wishes on stars. From earth,
we read the sky as if it is an unerring book
of the universe, expert and evident.
Still, there are mysteries below our sky:
the whale song, the songbird singing
its call in the bough of a wind-shaken tree.
We are creatures of constant awe,
curious at beauty, at leaf and blossom,
at grief and pleasure, sun and shadow.
And it is not darkness that unites us,
not the cold distance of space, but
the offering of water, each drop of rain,
each rivulet, each pulse, each vein.
O second moon, we, too, are made
of water, of vast and beckoning seas.
We, too, are made of wonders, of great
and ordinary loves, of small invisible worlds,
of a need to call out through the dark.
Limón was named the US Poet Laureate in 2022 and is serving a two-year term.
A Poet Laureate is a position appointed by the US Library of Congress each year.
It's one of the best-known literary positions in the US, but it's not a clearly-defined role.
They present a reading and lecture at the Library of Congress and usually take on a community-orientated poetry project of some kind.
"Some Laureates assume a highly visible role as a national advocate for poetry, while others eschew the spotlight and focus on their writing," a Library of Congress blog post explains.
It's a different role to the National Youth Poet Laureate — a role that became famous around the world when then-Youth Poet Laureate Amanda Gorman performed a poem at US President Joe Biden's inauguration.
Why send a poem into space?
While the spacecraft's mission will be to collect data (more on that below) the whole point of the mass participation project is inspiration.
"Inspiration is what fuelled the people who developed this flagship mission and who hand-crafted the largest spacecraft NASA has sent to explore the solar system," NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory director Laurie Leshin said.
"It's what drives humanity to ask the big questions that this mission will contribute to.
"Inspiration is riding along with every single name that will be making the journey to Europa."
What is NASA's Jupiter mission?
To gather data about one of Jupiters moons — there's dozens of them — to see if it has conditions suitable for life.
All things going according to plan, NASA's unmanned Europa Clipper spacecraft will begin its journey of about 2.6 billion kilometres towards Jupiter in October, 2024.
It's due to arrive in April 2030, when it will orbit Jupiter and perform close flybys of its icy moon called Europa.
Europa is among the most promising environments to sustain life within our solar system.
NASA says it could have "all the ingredients needed for life as we know it".
It is believed to have an icy crust that's about 15 to 25 kilometres thick.
There's evidence that, underneath this crust, Europa has a global ocean that contains more than twice Earth's amount of water.
That's pretty significant, especially given Europa is about 90 per cent the size of Earth's moon.
