Send your name on a Solar Sail

[bananas]

Sunday is the deadline for getting your name on Ikaros:

http://cosmiclog.msnbc.msn.com/archive/2010/03/19/2233551.aspx

Solar sails take shape
Posted: Friday, March 19, 2010 8:17 PM by Alan Boyle

As Japan gears up to send the first working solar sail into deep space in a couple of months, the Planetary Society is moving ahead with its own solar-sail project. You can put your name on both sails … if you act now.

Sunday is the deadline for adding your name to the list for Japan's Ikaros spacecraft, due to piggyback on the May 18 launch of the Venus-bound Akatsuki orbiter aboard a Japanese H-2A rocket. More than 25,000 people have signed up already using the Planetary Society's "Sail Away" Web page - and when those are added to the Japanese list, the tally goes up to 60,000 names.

All those names will be digitally encoded on the same kind of silica glass mini-DVD that was sent to the Red Planet on the Phoenix Mars Lander as well as on each of NASA's Mars rovers, said Bruce Betts, director of projects for the Planetary Society. The California-based society is a space advocacy group co-founded by the late astronomer Carl Sagan.

If you sign up now, you can get a two-fer: The list of names will also be encoded on a mini-DVD accompanying the Planetary Society's LightSail-1. And even if you miss out this weekend, you can still make it onto that later flight.

<snip>

Go here to sign up: http://www.planetary.org/special/fromearth/sail
It's a free and easy way of showing your support to the scientists working on these projects.

[FLyellowdog]

1. Cool! nt

[sarge43]

2. Thank you. n/t