Day 66/365: Send your name to be SIZZLED BY THE SUN

[nanila]

The Parker Solar Probe is due to launch this year, between July and August 2018. If you want to hitch a ride to the Sun with it, well, you can't. But your name can! A memory card with names on it will be carried on the spacecraft as it explores the Sun's atmosphere in a series of brutally boiling perihelion passes. Scorchio.

Sign up here by 27 April 2018, and you will receive a pretty digital certificate that you can save to PDF and/or print out.

Comments

[cactus_rs]

Will its orbit decay and send the probe *into* the Sun once it outlives its usefulness? Cause I can think of a few people I'd like to symbolically launch into the Sun...

[nanila]

They are a bit cagey about the end of mission strategy on the web site. I suspect this is deliberate. That is one potential disposal method, however...

[ayebydan]

This is awesome. I am a very happy Sam!

[nanila]

A happy Sam with a name that's going to get VERY HOT INDEED. :D

[tree_and_leaf]

Wow!

[nanila]

It's a neat public outreach idea. :)

[fred_mouse]

:}

[nanila]

:D

[silveradept]

That's neat. I wonder what might happen in the far future when I've of those probes with names on it encounters another intelligent species...

[nanila]

I hope they see it as the space-borne equivalent of graffiti. :D

[silveradept]

"Kilroy was here" writ across the universe. I'd like for our graffiti to be more like the Roman and Greek boasts, but that's very human-centric of me.

[pbristow]

I <3 it because its name is Parker.

Hardison: "Parker? *Parker*! You can-*not* just take a dive from Earth's orbit into the corona of the sun! That's - "

Eliot: "She's already gone, man."

Hardison: "... Twenty pounds of crazy."

Eliot: "In a five pound bag."

=:o}

(Is it a particularly nosey Parker? I think it should be.)

[nanila]

Well, there's nothing sensible about flying dangerously close to the Sun once. But 24+ times is Leverage-Parker levels of crazy for sure.