Help Get Your Messages On NASA's Pluto-Bound Spacecraft.

You can sign the petition for the New Horizons Message Initiative here:

http://www.newhorizonsmessage.com/sign-petition/

First 10,000 people to sign the petition will have their names transmitted with the 'Voyager Record 2.0' message as well

About the New Horizons Message Initiative, when I subscribed it a scaring doubt came to my mind: how much time a message can safely remain stored in the onboard flash memory. I strongly suspect that, due to ionizing radiation, it's very limited time, if compared to interstellar journey duration or even to Voyager disk life. Do someone knows some figure about this issue?

My personal concern is how they plan on encoding the message in such a way that the aliens' computer could decode it (in my own life I have found it impossible to get a Macintosh computer to recognize the existence of a U.S.B. Disk which has been attached to a Microsoft Windows computer). I am sure computer software engineers know more about this subject than I do.

MOD NOTE: Guys, it's a fun outreach activity; nothing more, nothing less. We really are not going discuss hypothetical data extraction techniques by COMPLETELY hypothetical extraterrestrials in the EXTRAORDINARILY remote event that NH is ever recovered by somebody a geological era or ten from now. That's all that will be said about this.

I prefer that your mission team brings this intriguing world out into the limelight!

And the New Horizons Message Initiative is a way to use the spacecraft as a time capsule...nothing more, nothing less. (As if future explorers will stumble upon the DVD that's aboard IKAROS or the marker that Hayabusa left behind on asteroid Itokawa a few years back...)

I have several points to make in response to the topic that I brought up.

1) I personally would like to see them send a digitized message similar to that of the Pioneer Plaque (a link to such a plaque can be found here).

2) I used Microsoft Paint to alter the plaque in such a way as to include the Jupiter encounter. My own diagram of the Jupiter flyby can be found here.

3) They would do well to include the dwarf planet Xena (and its moon Gabrielle) in such a plaque.

4) On an unrelated note, they would do well to include an image of General George Washington's entire body from head to toe, simply because his face appears on the two state quarters that are travelling inside the vehicle.

Please feel free to disagree with any of the above points.

Even in a terrestrial application, the guaranteed data retention time for NAND flash is only on the order of 10 years. It's likely that lower storage temperature will extend that, but flash is not a great choice for long-term data archiving.

Anything you put in it will be corrupt beyond recognition in a few decades anyway so the entire exercise is without merit.


And with that - I'll refer you back to the moderator note added to your previous post.

ADMIN NOTE: Posts above moved from the New Horizons' mission thread. Discussion on this public outreach idea - which may or may not happen - can continue here if necessary.

The New Horizons Message Initiative has been approved by NASA!

http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/20...horizons-space/

More info about how and what we can submit for the crowd-sourced message will be provided on the website below on August 25 of this year (which marks 25 years since Voyager 2 flew past Neptune and will also be the day that New Horizons crosses the ice giant's orbit before the Big Flyby in July of 2015)

http://www.oneearthmessage.org/

The first 10,000 people who signed the petition should have their names submitted with the message as well

Supposedly, there should have been a NASA press release about this project during the Neptune flyby anniversary last Monday, but oh well.

The One Earth: New Horizons Message website was updated with more info...can't wait for it to start taking submissions for this project

http://oneearthmessage.org/