NASA is LIVE! for the Europa Clipper Mission 10.14 11AM EST
https://www.youtube.com/live/lQToTWKwtuw?si=wRytXvurF6xKoDu8Sorry I tried to embed the video and it didn't work
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This original poem, written by U.S. Poet Laureate Ada Limón, is engraved on the vault plate in her own handwriting. The poem connects the two water worlds — Earth, yearning to reach out and understand what makes a world habitable, and Europa, waiting with secrets yet to be explored.
The poem was revealed at the Library of Congress on June 1, 2023. From that date until December 31, 2023, people around the world were invited to sign their names to the poem as part of NASA’s Message in a Bottle campaign. Over 2.6 million people submitted their names to be stenciled on a microchip that will travel to Europa alongside the poem. The campaign was a special collaboration, uniting art and science, by NASA, the U.S. Poet Laureate, and the Library of Congress.
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.
