Attendees at Comic-Con International in San Diego this week got the opportunity to write their name in the stars — or at least near one of Jupiter’s many moons.

As part of the Europa Clipper mission to Jupiter, NASA has asked the public to send in their names by December for inclusion on the spacecraft currently in development at the Jet Propulsion Lab in Pasadena.

Starting in October of next year, they’ll travel to Jupiter’s orbit along with a poem by the U.S. Poet Laureate Ada Limón, titled “In Praise of Mystery: A Poem for Europa.”

The poem “is an introduction from our ocean world to another ocean world,” said Laurance Fauconnet, a JPL public engagement specialist staffing the NASA booth on the exhibition floor at SDCC.

The NASA booth on the exhibition floor at SDCC was covered in wall-size artists’ renderings of Europa as a backdrop for photos and furnished with giant 3-D models of the ice sheets of the moon’s surface.

(Photo courtesy of NASA/JPL-Caltech)

The JPL booth at Comic-Con was covered in wall-size artists’ renderings of Europa as a backdrop for photos and furnished with giant 3-D models of the ice sheets of the moon’s surface. Those icy sheets — and the ocean thought to lie beneath — are what the mission will gather data on, to determine if the conditions are right to potentially support extraterrestrial life.

Also at the booth was a boulder-size model of the Psyche, the target of another mission by JPL and Arizona State University to explore for the first time an asteroid made of metal. Space enthusiasts in cosplay wandered the booth, taking photos in front of the exhibits and backdrop of Europa and chatting with members of JPL’s public engagement team about the Clipper mission and other ongoing research.

“We’re trying to ask these big questions: How does the universe work? Are we alone?” Fauconnet said. “And the exhibits are a way to talk about these big questions and how we’re answering them.”

Fauconnet said he was surprised that many of the SDCC fans who came up to the booth already knew many details about the Europa and Psyche missions.

“It underscores the fact that a lot of people who are going to Comic-Con are interested in science, they’re interested in exploration. They have that enthusiasm, and we’re able to meet their enthusiasm with ours.”

Science and art together

The Europa Clipper mission is not the first to invite participation from the public. People have been able to include their names on the craft containing the Mars Curiosity Rover, the Orion spacecraft used for the Artemis I mission, and others.

The inclusion of Limón’s poem is part of a nearly half-century-old tradition for the space agency to send art that represents human creativity and culture on missions.

The Golden Records aboard the two Voyager spacecraft launched in 1977 contained music by Bach and Chuck Berry. Astronomer Carl Sagan, who led the selection committee, said, “The launching of this bottle into the cosmic ocean says something very hopeful about life on this planet.”

The crossover between comics fans and space enthusiasts means that NASA not only staffs a booth, but also organizes panels where researchers can talk about their work to attendees. This year, agency-affiliated scientists participated in panels about studying solar eclipses, STEM topics in science fiction and engineering challenges in space.

“There’s a big part of science that’s not just doing the research — it’s also sharing that information and encouraging other people to get excited about it,” Fauconnet said. “Exploration is a shared human endeavor, and we want everybody to be part of that.”

The Clipper spacecraft, which will ultimately orbit Jupiter to conduct data-gathering flybys of Europa, is currently being assembled at JPL (and you can see the progress of construction in real time on their YouTube channel).

It is set to launch from Cape Canaveral, Fla., and, after a journey of 1.8 billion miles, is expected to reach Jupiter by 2030.

Chacko writes for the Southern California News Group.