Are you a creative person who wishes your personal expressions of originality and imagination could transcend the boundaries of time and space?
Well, NASA wants to help you achieve that lofty goal. Literally.
In September, NASA will launch its OSIRIS-REx spacecraft on the first U.S. mission to collect samples of an asteroid and return them to Earth for study. The public is invited to submit art work about what exploration means to them, which will be saved on a computer chip and stored on the spacecraft.
“Space exploration is an inherently creative activity,” Dante Lauretta, principal investigator for OSIRIS-REx at the University of Arizona in Tucson, said in a statement. “We are inviting the world to join us on this great adventure by placing their art work on the OSIRIS-REx spacecraft, where it will stay in space for millennia.”
The spacecraft already carries a chip with more than 442,000 names that were submitted last year through NASA and The Planetary Society’s “Messages to Bennu“ campaign.
The target asteroid, Bennu, is named for an Egyptian deity associated with the sun and the creation of Earth. That’s apropos, as mission scientists hope the samples retrieved during the mission will provide important clues of how our solar system formed and evolved.
Bennu — which measures approximately 538 yards in diameter — passes close to Earth every six years, meaning it grazed us by about 22,000 miles in 2013.
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